Darryl James
It is not only a shame that we have adopted a word that has always been negative, but is now no longer used in reference to anything original. Yet, the word "Ghetto" is now clearly and interminably, a Black thing, baby. And, that’s not a good thing at all.
All things Black or remotely Black are referred to as "Ghetto," but only in the most negative light, including any lower social behavior or related lifestyle. For example, when we see Black people acting without the social graces we are taught to pursue, we call them Ghetto, ignoring the fact that whites in the trailer park are prone to the same behaviors, but rarely, are those behaviors ever referred to as Ghetto.
For some of us Ghetto is the new cool, and we use the term to label every aspect of our behavior, even when it is no different from anyone else’s behavior. In a video for his single, "Been There, Done That," Dr. Dre performs a tango that he obviously took professional lessons to learn. Yet, he referred to it as the "Ghetto Tango," simply because Black people were doing it.
Another, perhaps more crucial difficulty with our relationship with the word Ghetto, is that we have embraced the term in our minds, creating a slave mentality that follows us up the economic ladder, where we find middle class Negroes referring to themselves and specific aspects of their behavior as Ghetto, when they should be celebrating in their joy of being out of the Ghetto.
And, even worse, we have been relegated to the Ghetto of the American consciousness, where we are thought of in Ghetto terms, no matter whether we are demonstrating our most base behavior as Flava Flav and Bobby Brown or exuding our finest dignity as Barack Obama and Denzel Washington.
For many non-Black Americans, we are rarely considered outside of so-called Ghetto situations. James Baldwin outlined this clearly, in Notes of a Native Son.
"One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds," penned Baldwin, as the voice of white America. "This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, have been kept in the social arena. He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence...as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease."
Baldwin was outlining the Ghetto-ization of the African in America, illustrating how important it is to keep us in our place mentally (our own minds as well as theirs), if not possible physically.
Baldwin went on: "If he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed. When he violates this image, therefore, he stands in the greatest danger...we uneasily suspect that he is very often playing a part for our benefit."
In other words, House Niggers who realize that walking through life with dignity as Black men or women has a certain jeopardy attached to it choose to coon and buck dance their way around being identified as a "threat" to America. And even the noble mental slaves, including our most refined entertainers and politicians who speak against us recognize the threat, and so choose to target others, by identifying the "Ghetto" Blacks and their "Ghetto" behavior as America’s intrinsic problem with Black people.
By serving up specific targets in the Black community (who are typically unaware and generally defenseless), noble mental slaves are hoping to avoid being targeted themselves.
We see this with brain dead comedians who extol the divergences between "Niggers" and "Blacks," and we see it when any of us refer to some of us as "you people."
Some of us with dignity refuse to use the word Ghetto in universal reference to Black people or Black behavior, any more than we accept the word "Nigger" as a universal label for some or all of us.
Still, others of us dance a precarious dance with the word "hood" that threatens at any point to take on the same meaning as Ghetto, even though with more subtlety.
If we are going to break the chains of our negative experience in America, we must first pay special attention to the powerful labels foist upon us, or embraced by us, including Nigger and Ghetto.
Case in point, "Barrio," a term once widely used to label areas where a high concentration of Hispanics was found, has been relegated to small pockets of society, but certainly no longer wholly embraced by that community.
And, no Jewish community in this nation refers to themselves or their living areas as Ghetto.
At some point, we have to force the reality upon the world that being Black in America is no more organically inferior an experience than being Asian or Italian or Irish, and so no more deserving of being placed in a literal or figurative Ghetto than being Jewish.
But first, we have to force that reality into our own minds.
- Darryl James is an award-winning author who is now a filmmaker. His first mini-movie, "Crack," was released in March of 2006. He is currently filming a full length documentary. James’ latest book, "Bridging The Black Gender Gap," is the basis of his lectures and seminars. Previous installments of this column can now be viewed at www.bridgecolumn.com. James can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
