Staying in or moving out? Justice and the abolition of the dark ghetto
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| Author | Andrei Poama |
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885117730674 |
| Subject Matter | Review Article |
EJPT
Review Article
Staying in or moving out?
Justice and the abolition
of the dark ghetto
Andrei Poama
Leiden University, the Netherlands
Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 2016, £16.95, pp. 352, ISBN: 9780674984073.
Abstract
Tommie Shelby articulates a nonideal theory of black US ghettos that casts them as
consequences of an intolerably unjust institutional structure. I argue that, despite some
of its significant merits, Shelby’s theory is weakened by his rejection of integration as a
principle for reforming disadvantaged ghettos and correcting structural injustices in the
US. In particular, I argue that Shelby unwarrantedly downplays the socio-economic
efficiency of integrationist policies and fails to consider some of the ways in which
integration might count as a duty of (corrective) justice.
Keywords
Basic social structure, ghetto abolition, integration, redistribution, social justice
A significant number of mostly African-American citizens in the US live in ghettos
affected by racial segregation, high poverty rates and multiple forms of socio-eco-
nomic disadvantage. When compared to the general population, ghetto residents
have a substantially lower life expectancy, are more exposed to both physical and
mental pathologies, have a less structured family life experience, suffer from consid-
erably higher unemployment rates, are less politically active and find themselves
disproportionately imprisoned. As a crude example, life expectancy in Cleveland
is 88 years in Lyndenhurst, one of the city’s well-off suburban neighbourhoods, and
64 years in Hough, the ghetto situated a few miles away in midtown Cleveland.
1
Tommie Shelby’s (2016) aim in Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent and Reform
is to examine these ‘metropolitan neighborhoods visibly marked by racial seg-
regation and multiple forms of disadvantage’ (p. 38) from the standpoint of
European Journal of Political Theory
2020, Vol. 19(1) 128–138
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885117730674
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Corresponding author:
Andrei Poama, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Institute of Public
Administration, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Email: a.poama@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
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