America's Ghettos: A Pedagogy for Urban and Rural Hope

The dominant image of the “ghetto” is of idle black men drinking forty‐ounce bottles of malt liquor and young black women “with distended bellies, their youthful faces belying the fact that they are often close to delivering their second or third child.” (Kelley, 1997, p. 127)

The disintegration of rural America is largely an invisible crisis ... you would never guess anything is wrong. From [the Interstate] you drive for hours passing fields of corn and beans that cover the horizon in lines as straight as a table's edge ... Everything you see speaks of abundance and prosperity…. The creation of rural ghettos is a complex process. (Davidson, 1996, p. 10‐11)