To hear Donald J. Trump tell it, America’s “inner cities” are on fire. They’re “a disaster education-wise, job-wise, safety-wise, in every way possible,” he declared in this week’s presidential debate.

“You walk down the street,” Mr. Trump said in his first debate with Hillary Clinton, “you get shot.”

It often sounds as if he is describing the Bronx in the 1970s, and not American cities like New York and Washington that today surround his own real estate projects......Continue Reading

We started to delve into again the notion of 'inner city' for any country, becoming popular in the 1960s and 70s. Regarding this issue, Professor Connolly, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, makes a clear response by saying that ''the inner city is the place that burned when King was assassinated. It was Watts. It was the place Ronald Reagan had to try to conduct the war on drugs.''

''It might be more accurate to call them ''disinvested neighbourhoods.''

''It’s just a wrong term to use descriptively, proscriptively,'' Professor Connolly said. ''All it does is reach the ears of white voters in a particular way.''

Top image: At Charlotte and East 170th Streets in the South Bronx in 1979. Credit John Sotomayor/The New York Times

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