Mark R. Gornik

“68. In A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Wilder writes, "The ghetto is not so much a place as it is a relationship - the physical manifestation of a perverse imbalance in social power. The ghetto is not the cause of social pathology, it is its destination. It is not the set of ever-changing, ever-negotiated disparities that dominate it but the financial, physical, and legal coercion that give rise to them. It cannot be defined by the people who occupy it but by the struggles that place them there. It is not social inequality but the attempt to predetermine the burden of social inequality. Thus, ghettos are different sizes, have different demographics, and suffer different conditions. They have in common only the lack of power that allows their residents to be physically concentrated and socially targeted" (p. 234).”
― Mark R. Gornik, To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City