that adhere to the image of progress and modernity are kept, while people who don't are discarded. For a long time, people who didn't live up to the supposed standards of modern society could be offloaded onto "premodern" countries. Now that the world is filling up, it's hard for countries to find a place to "dump" humans who aren't assigned any value.

Anderson's idea of the ghetto arguably gives America a space to keep lives that it deems unworthy and not useful. Anderson calls the ghetto trope a "powerful source of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination." In Bauman's framework, Anderson's ghetto acts as a dumping ground. It's a site that reinforces racist beliefs that Black people are of lesser value and disposable.

Judith Butler is commonly known as a queer theorist, yet her work isn't unrelated to sociology, since she studies the behavior and organization of humans and their societies. In Frames of War, Butler thinks of war "as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not." For Butler, an "ungrievable life" can't be "mourned because it has never lived"; thus, "it has never counted as a life at all."

Butler's idea ties together the work of Bauman and Anderson. The division of lives into "grievable" and "ungrievable" links to Bauman's concept of human waste, with the "ungrievable" lives representing discarded people. Butler's analysis also alludes to Anderson's concept of the ghetto since America continues to relegate Black people to the ghetto based on the bigoted belief that their lives don't count.

An essay linking Anderson’s “The Iconic Ghetto” to the work of a modern sociologist like Zygmunt Bauman should identify overlapping claims that both Anderson and the sociologist make.

For instance, in “The Iconic Ghetto,” Anderson discusses how the stereotypes about what the ghetto is were created and how they are used to spread unjustified fears about residents of Black urban communities. This brings to mind many of the points that sociologist Zygmunt Bauman is famous for. Bauman argued that contemporary society is not postmodern but rather a continuation of modernity he called “liquid modernity.”

In this “liquid” society, people no longer commit to a single identity and instead develop malleable identities that are constantly in flux. This way of life has led to a fear of difference which he called “mixophobia” among many people, particularly privileged elders who fear exclusion.

The way in which privileged white people in society fear “the ghetto” is reflective of this mixophobia. This fear of the other prompts people to separate from one another and can thus be understood as a reason why people who are not Black spread negative stereotypes about the image of the ghetto to marginalize Black communities.

An essay on this topic might identify one or several overlapping ideas that Anderson and a modern sociologist make. It should craft a defensible thesis that can be supported with direct evidence. For instance, a relevant thesis might start out saying something like this:

Elijah Anderson’s article “The Iconic Ghetto” incorporates several ideas from modern sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, including mixophobia, [second idea], and [third idea].