I've been in many of them [ghetto areas] and to some extent I would have to say this: If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Agnew’s remark treats urban poverty as a largely uniform, interchangeable phenomenon—suggesting that once one “slum” has been observed, the rest offer no meaningful differences. Read rhetorically, it compresses complex local histories (housing policy, segregation, employment patterns, municipal services) into a single stereotype, which can function to distance the speaker from the people and places described. The line also implies a kind of observational fatigue or impatience: repeated exposure yields not deeper understanding but a flattening generalization. In political context, such phrasing can support arguments for broad, standardized responses—or, conversely, for disengagement—by implying that particularities do not matter.