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.
