Voluntary ghettos persist because residents cannot step out of internalized segregation.

Evidence

Israel Zangwill described such ghettos in his Children of the Ghetto (first published 1892) when he characterized the London ghetto as of “voluntary formation” and yet nevertheless an imposition: “People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries are not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor to efface the brands on their souls by pulling off the yellow badges” (Zangwill, 1925:1-2). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2381

Categorization

• QUESTION: Zangwill’s line about not being able to ‘efface the brands on their souls’ suggests a psychological mechanism of internalized segregation — worth exploring how this compares to modern theories of internalized spatial constraint.
• XREF: This is historically continuous with the later American sociological literature on the ghetto (Wirth’s ‘The Ghetto’, and beyond) that the reader’s urban-studies material probably covers.