Thursday, December 01, 2005
I hate the Ghetto.
I always have. Coming home, I mutated into a six foot one inch Whitley Gilbert, so snobbish and judgmental that I want the entire Black community of Portsmouth, Virginia placed under strict quarantine. I realize many of you immediately channel Michael Eric Dyson at these words of frustration, but the nappy dreadlocks and barely glued tracks and plastic nails and unkempt beards and sagging pants and booty shorts and coarse language and unplanned pregnancies and gaudy makeup and narcotics sales and firearm violence and police brutality and general apathy overwhelms even the most compassionate conservatives among us. And believe me, my friends, I am liberal. I will not absorb the soft bigotry of low expectations concerning my racial brethren's unresolved socioeconomic plight.
I reject elitism, discard optimism. We free thinking African Americans must apply both our logic and our solidarity toward our sisters and brothers who work and play in local low-budget strip clubs, where the scantily-clad sex workers display stretch marks and cigarette burns along with their sienna pancake nipples and landing strip pubes. Dear Precious, the auburn-skinned temptress voluptuous with double E-cup breasts and a butterscotch behind so fat even Cherokee fears her pornography assets require upgrade, eagerly requests seventy dollars from your best friend for her thirty-five minute lap dance, where you are unsure who molested who yet utterly convinced no one will face prosecution, and informs you she's studying for her Masters Degree in Accounting at respected Old Dominion University. You want to praise her determination; yet can't believe her upwardly mobile pronouncement. Besides, your dark brown eyes struggle to focus on her light-gray contact lenses, hope to avoid her haphazardly re-applied showgirl G-string, left-of-center, tossed on too tightly, revealing most of her shaven womanly cleft. Topless and talkative, energetic and erotic, Precious flashes her winning worker's smile; sound escapes your notice. A strong shoulder slap from your friend shatters your reverie. Precious offers her talents to your horny human form. You don't like strip clubs. You don't respect ghetto strippers, forced by inner-city economics to secure enough Federal Reserve Notes by any means necessary to provide Similiac and Pampers and cable television to the youthful progeny they shouldn't produce. You dislike the primitive, new-age Neanderthal sexuality that your race-gender-age demographic displays without moral confusion or public inhibition. You realize that only your infinite capacity for hate prevents you from taking Precious' offer. Not your infinite love for your life partner, not your human fear of sexually transmitted disease contraction, not your financial straits. You haven't seen your Angel in a month, and your heart, mind, and body miss her. You have no serious belief that you can contract an STD from a simple gyrating posterior upon your Dockers-covered khaki crotch. Your best friend will cover any payment you can't make. You leave the club.
The Ghetto deserves criticism as long as the Ghetto saps my very soul. Temptation is not an island, it's oxygen. We require both to survive and feel human. The Ghetto however, degrades human interaction with its constant, chosen civic flirtation with poverty-line pop culture. Small business entrepreneurship, the backbone of upward mobility for ethnic and political minorities since Thucydidies, should be supported by all Americans, but I cannot ignore that Ms. Trang's nail shops and Ivan Draco's Guns & Ammo drains purchasing power from the African American community. We spend outside ourselves and later wonder at our own poverty. Further, human creativity, silenced through hip-hop commercialism, atrophies amid the unceasing reverberation of trap rhetoric and dope boy imagery. In high school, I befriended drug dealers and drug users, knew teenage mothers and incarcerated students. Cornell presented memory soma; my absence made my heart grow colder. Forgetfulness is bliss, exile divine. Today, the stark street-level reality of life in economically downtrodden Black Suburbia impedes any and all Mother Teresa compassion for the Coon Calcutta that surrounds my parents' home. Unless one works at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, or stays the course in Iraq for George W. Bush, petty criminality emerges as one's vocation of choice. All those hoop dreams and hood tournaments amount to less than the broken asphalt that housed them once your second child in two years is born and your hours have been cut back at the Gwaltney meatpacking plant. The Ghetto we all know and some love promotes death to Black America; funerals for the barely alive and sadly immature dot the gray urban landscape, populated by a middle-aged and steadily graying integrated African American professional ruling class, self-centered Christian capitalist, who attend the morning services of their children with dripping tears and loud lamentations. Choked sermons and punctuated eulogies ring horror and sadness and death over bountiful bouquets of family flower arrangements, fuchsia and lavender and rouge and white, while humbled homies wait in the surreal cathedral to say a final Boyz II Men goodbye to a fallen comrade they've already avenged with the heatseeking hollow-point homicide of another young Black man. It's 2005; Young Jeezy is more culturally relevant than Rosa Parks, no matter what Oprah says.
Yes, I'm Whitley, petty bourgeoisie, and I deride the Ghetto. I'm no better than these people; I'm not superior to these people, but I do not respect these people. Life is not an ongoing episode of BET Uncut. Ali and Big Gipp will not provide country narration amid natural Negro teats and ashy Black knees while the shaky Handicam nine millimeter manned by Lil' Pookie at Freaknik treats your optic nerves to ever-bouncing, always shaking bare Black asses and overweight, potbellied Black men with flashy, jewel-encrusted cups and shiny, jewel-encrusted teeth who treat their expensive custom cars and Jacob the Jeweler medallions and Pitbull Kennels canines better than they treat Black women. In every Disco Inferno, the Black woman burns at the stake. No one forces a tip drill to take an African American Express up the ass, but remember that Ghetto Approval requires inhuman commodification. Respect, or love, or compassion for the Ghetto requires a level of intellectual clemency I refuse the political felons within my community. Black anti-feminism, Black homophobia, Black racism, Black anti-intellectualism, and Black poverty emerge from and are produced by the Ghetto to some definable capacity, and now that it's once again a living, breathing social antagonist in my life, my hatred knows no bounds. The neo-Talented Tenth reject the Africana Studies plea to return to the universal 'hood to assist those we leave behind for exactly this reason: We hated the Ghetto just as much as the Ghetto hated us before we left, and we do not belong if ever we return. On the bitterly cold streets of Portsmouth, where street prostitutes and street pharmaceuticalists exchange monies before dawn to provide momentary sensory overload to the American proletariat, I walk among the damned, exiled by education, ostracized by originality, the displaced collegian touring urban blighted alleyways and substance abused addicts in a personal fact-finding mission like Rep. John Murtha on the gritty streets of Baghdad. It's a different world, the one I ran from.
I always have. Coming home, I mutated into a six foot one inch Whitley Gilbert, so snobbish and judgmental that I want the entire Black community of Portsmouth, Virginia placed under strict quarantine. I realize many of you immediately channel Michael Eric Dyson at these words of frustration, but the nappy dreadlocks and barely glued tracks and plastic nails and unkempt beards and sagging pants and booty shorts and coarse language and unplanned pregnancies and gaudy makeup and narcotics sales and firearm violence and police brutality and general apathy overwhelms even the most compassionate conservatives among us. And believe me, my friends, I am liberal. I will not absorb the soft bigotry of low expectations concerning my racial brethren's unresolved socioeconomic plight.
I reject elitism, discard optimism. We free thinking African Americans must apply both our logic and our solidarity toward our sisters and brothers who work and play in local low-budget strip clubs, where the scantily-clad sex workers display stretch marks and cigarette burns along with their sienna pancake nipples and landing strip pubes. Dear Precious, the auburn-skinned temptress voluptuous with double E-cup breasts and a butterscotch behind so fat even Cherokee fears her pornography assets require upgrade, eagerly requests seventy dollars from your best friend for her thirty-five minute lap dance, where you are unsure who molested who yet utterly convinced no one will face prosecution, and informs you she's studying for her Masters Degree in Accounting at respected Old Dominion University. You want to praise her determination; yet can't believe her upwardly mobile pronouncement. Besides, your dark brown eyes struggle to focus on her light-gray contact lenses, hope to avoid her haphazardly re-applied showgirl G-string, left-of-center, tossed on too tightly, revealing most of her shaven womanly cleft. Topless and talkative, energetic and erotic, Precious flashes her winning worker's smile; sound escapes your notice. A strong shoulder slap from your friend shatters your reverie. Precious offers her talents to your horny human form. You don't like strip clubs. You don't respect ghetto strippers, forced by inner-city economics to secure enough Federal Reserve Notes by any means necessary to provide Similiac and Pampers and cable television to the youthful progeny they shouldn't produce. You dislike the primitive, new-age Neanderthal sexuality that your race-gender-age demographic displays without moral confusion or public inhibition. You realize that only your infinite capacity for hate prevents you from taking Precious' offer. Not your infinite love for your life partner, not your human fear of sexually transmitted disease contraction, not your financial straits. You haven't seen your Angel in a month, and your heart, mind, and body miss her. You have no serious belief that you can contract an STD from a simple gyrating posterior upon your Dockers-covered khaki crotch. Your best friend will cover any payment you can't make. You leave the club.
The Ghetto deserves criticism as long as the Ghetto saps my very soul. Temptation is not an island, it's oxygen. We require both to survive and feel human. The Ghetto however, degrades human interaction with its constant, chosen civic flirtation with poverty-line pop culture. Small business entrepreneurship, the backbone of upward mobility for ethnic and political minorities since Thucydidies, should be supported by all Americans, but I cannot ignore that Ms. Trang's nail shops and Ivan Draco's Guns & Ammo drains purchasing power from the African American community. We spend outside ourselves and later wonder at our own poverty. Further, human creativity, silenced through hip-hop commercialism, atrophies amid the unceasing reverberation of trap rhetoric and dope boy imagery. In high school, I befriended drug dealers and drug users, knew teenage mothers and incarcerated students. Cornell presented memory soma; my absence made my heart grow colder. Forgetfulness is bliss, exile divine. Today, the stark street-level reality of life in economically downtrodden Black Suburbia impedes any and all Mother Teresa compassion for the Coon Calcutta that surrounds my parents' home. Unless one works at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, or stays the course in Iraq for George W. Bush, petty criminality emerges as one's vocation of choice. All those hoop dreams and hood tournaments amount to less than the broken asphalt that housed them once your second child in two years is born and your hours have been cut back at the Gwaltney meatpacking plant. The Ghetto we all know and some love promotes death to Black America; funerals for the barely alive and sadly immature dot the gray urban landscape, populated by a middle-aged and steadily graying integrated African American professional ruling class, self-centered Christian capitalist, who attend the morning services of their children with dripping tears and loud lamentations. Choked sermons and punctuated eulogies ring horror and sadness and death over bountiful bouquets of family flower arrangements, fuchsia and lavender and rouge and white, while humbled homies wait in the surreal cathedral to say a final Boyz II Men goodbye to a fallen comrade they've already avenged with the heatseeking hollow-point homicide of another young Black man. It's 2005; Young Jeezy is more culturally relevant than Rosa Parks, no matter what Oprah says.
Yes, I'm Whitley, petty bourgeoisie, and I deride the Ghetto. I'm no better than these people; I'm not superior to these people, but I do not respect these people. Life is not an ongoing episode of BET Uncut. Ali and Big Gipp will not provide country narration amid natural Negro teats and ashy Black knees while the shaky Handicam nine millimeter manned by Lil' Pookie at Freaknik treats your optic nerves to ever-bouncing, always shaking bare Black asses and overweight, potbellied Black men with flashy, jewel-encrusted cups and shiny, jewel-encrusted teeth who treat their expensive custom cars and Jacob the Jeweler medallions and Pitbull Kennels canines better than they treat Black women. In every Disco Inferno, the Black woman burns at the stake. No one forces a tip drill to take an African American Express up the ass, but remember that Ghetto Approval requires inhuman commodification. Respect, or love, or compassion for the Ghetto requires a level of intellectual clemency I refuse the political felons within my community. Black anti-feminism, Black homophobia, Black racism, Black anti-intellectualism, and Black poverty emerge from and are produced by the Ghetto to some definable capacity, and now that it's once again a living, breathing social antagonist in my life, my hatred knows no bounds. The neo-Talented Tenth reject the Africana Studies plea to return to the universal 'hood to assist those we leave behind for exactly this reason: We hated the Ghetto just as much as the Ghetto hated us before we left, and we do not belong if ever we return. On the bitterly cold streets of Portsmouth, where street prostitutes and street pharmaceuticalists exchange monies before dawn to provide momentary sensory overload to the American proletariat, I walk among the damned, exiled by education, ostracized by originality, the displaced collegian touring urban blighted alleyways and substance abused addicts in a personal fact-finding mission like Rep. John Murtha on the gritty streets of Baghdad. It's a different world, the one I ran from.
16 Comments:
At 11/30/2005 11:21:00 PM, Jenn said:;
I understand the dislike of the ghetto for all that it represents a complacency in being a second-class, but perhaps you could clarify -- why do you seem to wholly blame those (trapped? willingly confined?) within the Ghetto for all of the ghettoness? Shouldn't the white power structure at least share some of the blame? And, even, at least following this logic (though we've clashed on this before), my people, for opening the nail shops and liquor stores?
At 11/30/2005 11:21:00 PM, Jenn said:;
oh, and you're a jerk-face for only not fucking that strippa-ho 'cuz of your dislike of the ghetto and not cuz i woulda pulled your scrotum from your crotch and shoved it deep into your rectum.
jerk-face.
At 12/01/2005 02:50:00 AM, James said:;
Free will damns the Ghetto. Yes, historical and current socioeconomic racism and political repression negatively affects Ghetto life, along with apolitical immigrant siphoning of Black economic self-determination. Still, neither Mr. Charlie nor Ms. Trang force young Black people in poor neighborhoods to shun the language of commerce for the jargon of the trap. No store denies young Black females birth control devices in order to sell sistas overpriced Air Jordan sneakers.
Free will is nothing to fuck with. When Black people become complicit in the systemic racism that oppresses them, they relinquish victimhood for self-hate antagonism, and become America's newest house slaves. I can't respect those who choose burnt cork over free expression.
And I think pulling my scrotum from my crotch just to shove it into my rectum would simply suck. Ow.
At 12/01/2005 02:54:00 PM, Jgracefully said:;
So...if "Precious" was an Ivy League-grad WASP, w/a dusty, wasted diploma earned via alumni donations from her Mayflower-migrant family, married to money longer than her triple-strand Mikimoto pearls, who mixed her morning Ovaltine w/vodka and oxycontin before she blew the gardener behind the shed - would you "respect" her then????
C'mon, James. Keep it gangster.
I think you're confused b/c those book smart/street dumb assholes at Cornell got you feeling like the "right" thing to do shouldn't feel good. Everyone falls victim to SOMETHING; every race, every culture, every man/woman/child on the planet finds their vice - don't be mad 'cause you want to trade your "educated-do-gooder" self-deprivation in for a Chevy on 22's and a sack of 'dro...shorty at the shake joint had that ass open, huh?? *smile* It's okay, baby! Cut a stripper if you want to - I promise, it won't hurt!
You'll never be as perfect as you want to be...might as well get your swerve on every now and then, bruh.
At 12/01/2005 05:48:00 PM, James said:;
JGracefully, to answer your hypothetical, no, I would not respect that type of Desperate Housewife. But notice, your "Precious" and the one I composed have a similar problem. Neither moves beyond their given socialized programming to achieve self-defined goals through their own initiative. Whether stripper or socialite, Precious emerges as an example of a larger problem - local cultures that discard personal betterment for some demographics for individual anonymity, the safety of the herd. I don't see why the Ghetto is some magical place people never want to condemn; those who escape the high crime, poverty, STD's and drama are always the exceptions, never the rules. How is that positive?
Further, I'm no chaste Vatican priest straining to uphold chastity vows. I'm not an "educated do-gooder" trying to preserve moral superiority over folk who wouldn't care about my criticism if the State paid them. I'm not trying to suppress personal Ghetto tendencies with outward condemnation. I'll say it straight: the 'hood does not deserve pity. Educated African Americans often avoid dissing the Black underclass - so much so that scandal erupts whenever a Black person audaciously attacks the self-defeating behaviors the Ghetto promotes. This Bill Cosby backlash helps no one.
At 12/01/2005 09:16:00 PM, Jaimie said:;
James,
Have you ever read "From Plantation to Ghetto"?
Check it out if you haven't.
Glad you're back.
At 12/02/2005 02:09:00 PM, Jgracefully said:;
Okay...now...I ain't no member of academia/Rhodes scholar, so maybe I'm lost, but your latest posts suuuuuure have seemed "Bill Cosby-ish" to me.
First off, you're like, the 'hood ain't shit; people there ain't trying, they're listening to "LaffyTaffy" instead of Grover Washington, Jr., they wear fake nails, smoke crack and keep having babies outta wedlock, yadda yadda yadda - just snapping on 'em...going off like they kidnapped you or something and made you be ig'nant w/them!
The one and ONLY point I was trying to share was that w/a mere shift of your paradigm, those attributes of the impoverished that you so detest can be beautiful; inspirational, even.
Bear w/me, now...your connection w/the "Desperate Houswife" chick and Precious, seemed in my opinion, to have more to do w/the aesthetics of their situations and not their individual deeds. You couldn't help but notice her beautiful body, but you said you didn't "respect" her 'cause she was capitalizing off of it - should she have respected your tricking ass, breaking bread in the club for a whole lot of nothing?? You ain't even have no money! She was being nice, really! She's going to college, she's planning for the future - how is getting it how you live "socialized programming" dog?? Maybe in another life she could have been a geisha, or a heiress and never degraded herself publically by tip-drilling...but who's to say she wouldn't have become a liar? An adulteress?? A thief, even?
See, all I was trying to express is that the scope of a life is loooooong...we all sin and fall short on a daily basis, you know? I don't look at the ghetto as any worse than surburbia, the trailer park, a gated community, or a private island. ('Prolly 'cause I've had the pleasure of rolling Swishers in and around all of them!)
When you take an act, or a choice, and try to trace it back to environment and socialization, the waters of understanding become cloudy w/the many instances that prove "nature vs. nurture" null and void. There's just too many cases in history where that whole theory has been trashed - Jesus was from Nazareth of all places! James Baldwin was gay! Tina Turner, the diva from Nutbush! Human beings have an amazing capacity for adaptation and survival. To say that Precious would have done anything other than stripping had she been raised in say, Geneva, Switzerland, is speculation, plain and simple - furthermore, it's wrong, b/c I lived in Geneva and the cabaret dancers there make the chicks in Atlanta look like amateurs. Real talk.
It ain't any more trife to be a hoe on the low while you run a Fortune 500 company than it is to stroll the track on any given MLK. The whole "idea" that there is something base and vile about areas in which less-affluent black people live is the single most oppressive part of living there. That whole "shame" concept of crackheads reeeeeally pisses me off, b/c I know just as many functional alcoholics that imbibe w/abandon while signing checks as I do junkies who sell bootleg CDs. It's like a mental trap that actually hurts the innocent; most of all, the children.
People put so much emphasis on the wrongs and shortcomings of urban areas while neglecting to mention the many, often more offensive wrongs of the rest of the world.
(Kinda like crucifying everyday dope dealers and letting pharmaceutical companies that deny low-cost meds to impoverished countries slide.)
I can listen to Beethoven, Sizzla, Phyllis Hyman, Jeezy, and Nina Simone all in the same day. I can find aspects of 5-star hotels that are unsatisfactory as well as I can complain that my auntie'nem got roaches. I have huge breasts that sometimes, I rock out like a hoochie, and on other occasions I cover - I'm STILL a scandalous bitch - I'll take your man either way! I find beauty in those wild, crazy gel-and-weave styles b/c that shit is a talent! Do you know how long you've got to experiment w/a Spanish-Wavy #4 ponytail before you find the golden mean ratio of Pre-con to spritz??! See?? You're 'sposed to be smart! I BET you can't cornrow! *raising eyebrow*
You feel me, James?? I know it hurts to go home and see people you know doing bad, but don't diss what they're doing, itemizing their shopping lists and individual tastes...diss THEM! Personally! Trying to clown ol' girl stripping, like it's on some ghetto shit, ain't right - she's just an everyday opportunist w/moral fibre made of spandex.
Those type'a broads come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and nationalities - not just 'hood hoes raised on Welfare. Be down enough for your sisters to see them for who they'd LIKE to be, not just who/what they're reduced to acting as. Can you not see past "right" or "wrong" far enough to read intentions??
I thank my lucky stars to be from the 'hood - I live in a highrise now, w/a maid and a $1000 cat, but you ain't gon' never, never, NEVER catch me dissing where I came from, homeboy. Never that. When I'm in the locker room at the gym, listening to the white girls cry about their meth habits and absent husbands, thas' when I'm most proud. I'll never be able to trace my family line back to 16th century Scotland like them (hell, my momma never met her own daddy) but it's cool...'cause I'm gangster. I'm me. Thas' what's really 'hood.
What Bill Cosby (and YOU) oughta complain about is the loss of culture in AMERICA - the lack of empathy, declining marriage rates, the disappearing middle-class, and hedonistic glorification in the media. Not just whas' popping on the block. It's a national crisis, not a "black" one.
At 12/06/2005 03:06:00 PM, Karlos said:;
Just wanted to drop some love on ya, J. My best to your parents - you know I love them - and don't let your dad volunteer for any elective surgical procedures just 'cause it's hot in the Mekong delta.
As for your dismay at coming home to an unchanged world, I feel ya. I came back to the streets of the 'Sota and they're all, "Yah, I'm goin' up nooorth to do some huntin' ...yah, you betcha... an' some fishin', don'cha know," and I'm like, "DA-yum, muhfukkas! Ain't nobody unnerstan' whu'cho farm-bred ass be sayin', y'all!" ...well, I'm paraphrasing, but the exchange went something like that.
Anyway, much love, and I'm still a sucker for your particular brand of offbeat, off-color, oft-provocative prose.
-K
At 12/07/2005 10:18:00 AM, Anonymous said:;
Not that I'm hatin' on you or prejudicin' on you but you’re thinkin’ my job is to placate you and I’m thinkin’ my job is to vacate you...I’ve seen the sit-ins and the back of the busses, seen the front of the busses, too, and the view ain't no better... I’ve read marcus and malcolm and langston and lorraine and ralph and martin and james and maya and toni and came to the conclusion that all them words just gimme a damn headache... I now know why so many white folk got such a thrill outta watchin' roots, and I’ve made love to kunte kinte a million times and been his bride at least as many times... I’ve cried for dorothy and josephine and often scratched my nappy head over the rest of the world's fascination (preoccupation) with my peoples... I’ve paid my debt to jungle fever and given birth to children who will pass...I’ve witnessed the lord first, second and third hand and seen his miracles whip us into a frenzy, but don't have a clue why He ain't given us our peace of heart yet... forgive me, malcolm, forgive me, martin, but I’m still alone... still fighting...still shackled... still in love, but still confused... my color, my content, my character has survived... but at what point will I know when I've truly arrived? affirmative action keeps me educated, but so what, I’m the only Person of Color in the Humanities Department... my brothers, my sisters all assume I’m a token, simply because I’m so well-spoken... I’m alive, I will survive, (and I sure enuf ain't no midwife)... with or without you, I will never be all about you, and as long as your tongue keeps me from climbin' your rungs, I will be content to be your worst malcontent 'cuz my intent is to put a dent in your pent-up guilt and watch your ego wilt... share that...
At 12/10/2005 07:15:00 PM, deeblizz said:;
About the "hood" and pity and plasticity at that...remember when you called our class plastic people? Well, plastic comes in all colors and flavors my friend. Plastic can sit in a government class in rigid ignorance or twist around a pole while the bass thumps in the club at night...
You are right. Pity is not applicable here. But understanding leaves no room for disgust or sympathy.
What sets you apart from those you dread and condemn? Think of those qualities and follow the yellow brick road of your life back to their source...you will see that you are the exception, not the rule. You are the mutation, made for the future. You are a product of the ghetto that gave you birth, my friend.
At 12/14/2005 07:28:00 AM, Texas Tiger in NYC said:;
I am intrigued by the dialogue you are having with jgracefully. But first, this is my first time visiting your blog and I have already fallen in love with it. It's thought provoking, opinionated, sarcastic and sometimes malicious (all the qualities I look for in a man).
Having said that, I am not here to defend the ghetto (as much of what I know about the ghetto I read in the books of William Julius Wilson) nor am I here to comment on the socioeconomic struggles of the poor (whom are often chocolate, mocha or honey colored).
But what I would like for you to consider is that if we look at EACH of the examples you used in your prose regarding traits, bad habits and "negative" responses to social circumstances, there are examples of those same very circumstances across the spectrum in terms of economic advancement, race and culture.
Let's look at Precious, the stripper whom I think is commendable for using what she has (the booty and the body) to get what she wants (the high-priced education). Yes, I think BET UnCut is a hot mess, and yes I think video girls are a little bit disgusting, but isn’t capitalism about pimpin your products and services to the highest bidder so you can live the American dream? And honestly, what is the different between Precious and an upper-east side chick (by the way I live in New York)?
For me, there is no TRUE difference between a slutty rich girl (ala Paris Hilton) and an uneducated baby momma who understands the game (ala Kim Porter, Diddy's #1 chick/baby momma). If you use your looks, face and breasts to land a rich man so you can do nothing but shop AND lunch every day (upper east side chick) vs. screw a rich rapper so you can shop AND lunch all day (Kim Porter) what is the real difference when you strip it all down to what is really going on?
We talk about the ghetto, but what I have learned from Oprah is that there is some f*cked up sh*t going on in the suburbs. From crystal meth, to child slavery to swingers and sex parties (did you see it yesterday?), the same things you attribute to ghetto behavior happens in communities where folks have money AND are WASPs.
Color and class do not prevent moral and emotional poverty, bad behavior, drug use, early sexual initiation, drinking and driving or other social ills. The only things wrong with the ghetto is lack of financial power AND opportunity.
Now don't get me wrong, I am a bit of Whitley Gilbert too (though I model myself after Bryant Gumbel and Wayne Brady) HOWEVER I just want you too add to your critique that the SAME problems you attribute to poor black folk also go on with rich White folk.
Feel me?
At 1/01/2006 08:26:00 PM, Jgracefully said:;
Dude - if you're going to post once a month keep it consistent! On the FIRST...like a government check.
*smile*
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year's, etc. to you and yours.
At 1/02/2006 11:04:00 AM, Ian said:;
I detest the same ignorant, self-defeating behaviors that you do; however, I also marvel at the resolve of the people forced to stay there who reject such behaviors. Granted, these people are often older, and they bear a good deal of responsibility for raising the current generation, but I constantly see people who are fed up with the ignorance, disrespectful attitudes, bad decisions, and crime, but who will never have the means to escape. The fact that some children ever become not only functional, but successful given this environment is incredible. I understand where you're coming from with your assault on the ghetto environment, but wholesale condemnation of a group is always problematic.
Perhaps the underlying target of your ire is the romanticization of the ghetto, especially by middle to upper class black academics who, because of their personal insecurities, view the ghetto as the wellspring of black authenticity.
And Jenn, why blame Asians, Arabs, etc. for setting up shops in black neighborhoods? I don't buy the notion that they are being condemned for taking money out of the community, not because they aren't black. They took an economic risk that nobody else wanted (or was able) to take. They can do with their money as they please. If people spent as much time criticizing banks for their racist loan practices as they do referring to Asians and Jews (but not black business owners who fail to reinvest) as "parasites," perhaps they could work on changing the situation
At 1/11/2006 10:25:00 AM, Tif said:;
That was the most elequent, well written, prose-like, piece of creative writing that I disagree with. Although I despise the ghetto for what it isn't, I also love the ghetto for what it is, a soverign community that basically governs itself. Ghetto doesn't neccessarily have to have bad connotations. I love the ghetto that Toni Morrison writes about. The ghetto from Spike lee movies. The ghetto games, the water plug, ding dong dixie, catch a girl get a girl. The ghetto sense of security, the ghetto that can make a black man able to withstand anything corporate America can throw at him. The non-assimilating ghetto where you got your butt whooped by your neighbor for acting up and got another whooping when you got home. I now have no clue who my neighbors are and haven't seen a kid besides my own in years. I get with family and friends maybe twice a year. i miss that good ghetto-- wish there was one and wish I lived there.
At 7/23/2006 12:04:00 PM, Anonymous said:;
My wife and I moved in to a "transitional" Wash DC neighborhood almost three years ago. I tutored in the same location over a 5 year period long before me or any other white would consider living here.
We moved back to the U.S. after living outside the country for a couple years. One of the reasons that I wanted to move here because I could not imagine myself happy living in white suburbia with its SUV, overfed citizens, and mindless love of country.
With two boys under the age of 6 - we see things from a parents perspective. Having said all this I cannot say enough how much what James wrote struck a nerve with me. Experiences have a cumulative effect. At somepoint I lost patience for the behavior I see on a daily basis. What ever respect for the community I might have had has long since evaporated. After three years here, we look forward to getting away from America - both black and white.
At 7/26/2006 02:29:00 AM, James said:;
Anonymous, thanks for your comments. My patience with so-called ghetto elements in Black residential communities has long since evaporated. I can understand your position in leaving; one's sanity must be prized above collective concerns.
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