Revisiting the Second Ghetto

Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto, published in 1983, responded to the ghettoization school of African American urban history but simultaneously provided an agenda for more recent histories of race relations, white identity, civil rights, and grassroots politics. Making the Second Ghetto shared the pessimism of earlier studies of the "ghetto" but challenged the notions of a timeless, enduring racism in American life. Hirsch anticipated many of the major themes of the new scholarship on whiteness by focusing on the contingent and contested nature of white identity. By turning attention to the understudied realm of local politics, Hirsch set an agenda for twentieth-century historians who integrate social and political histories. Finally, Hirsch offered a rigorous historical framework for examining the spatialization of racial inequality in modern urban America.