This article offers a critical examination of three premises that have dominated and vitiated the recent debate on racial division and urban poverty in the United States: a) to dilute the notion of ghetto simply to designate an urban area of intense poverty, which obscures the racial basis of this poverty and divests the term of both historical meaning and institutional contents; b) the idea that it is a "disorganized" social formation that can be analyzed in terms of lack and deficiencies rather than by identifying the principles that underlie its internal order; c) to exoticize the ghetto and its residents, that is, to spotlight the most extreme and unusual aspects of ghetto life as seen from outside and above, i.e., from the standpoint of the dominant. Endowed with plausibility by the weight of cultural history, reinforced by an individualistic national idiom that euphemizes class power and ethnoracial domination, these premises form a formidable "epistemological obstacle" to an adequate construction of the ghetto as a scientific object.