This article contributes to a comparative sociology of urban inequality and ethno-racial/class exclusion by means of a contextualized analysis of the social and mental structures of immobility and ostracization in the Parisian working-class banlieue and Chicago's Afro-American ghetto. The first part of the paper addresses territorial indignity and its disintegrative consequences upon the fabric and form of the local social structure. Analysis of the powerful stigma that attaches to residence in an area publicly recognized as a 'dumping ground' for poor people and downwardly mobile households reveals die symbolic dispossession that turns their residents into urban outcasts. The second part tackles the social divisions and bases of conflict operative within these stimatized neighbourhoods and identifies some of the factors that account for the pervasiveness of a dichotomous racial consciousness in the American Black Belt and for the lack of potency of ethno-racial distinctions in the French Red Belt despite their discursive proliferation in the public sphere. This comparison highlights the distinctively racial dimension of inner city poverty. in the United States and suggests that colour segregation, especially when it is tolerated or reinforced by the state, radicalizes the objective and subjective reality of urban exclusion and intensifies the cumulation of urban dispossession.
