Writing in the Boston Globe last month, reporter Vanessa Jones described “The Ghetto Culture Machine: What Goes Wrong When Stereotypes Become Part of the Mainstream:”
College and high school students throw “ghetto parties,” at which white kids in blackface wear diamonds around their necks and grills on their teeth. Comedian Michael Richards utters a racial epithet on a comedy stage after some black men heckle him. Radio personality Don Imus calls the black members of Rutgers University’s women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s.”
The incidents seem disconnected, but in the mind of writer Cora Daniels, they exemplify a change that has slowly engulfed mainstream culture. In her new book, “Ghettonation,” she calls these acts “ghetto.” The word first described sections of European cities where Jews were forced to live, and became defined as neighborhoods where people of color reside because of social or economic hardships. But Daniels says it has broken away from those original meanings to become a mindset.
“Ghetto is no longer where you live — it’s how you live,” she explains during an interview. “It’s a mindset that embraces and celebrates the worst….Behavior that shouldn’t be acceptable has become acceptable and commonplace.”
….
When [Northeastern University Professor of Music and African-American Studies Emmet] Price brought up the subject of ghetto parties in his Northeastern classroom, he says his white students reacted by saying, “So what? ” They considered ghetto parties no more harmful than toga parties, says Price. Graves believes the students’ inability to understand the inherent racism reflects the fact that many whites believe the problems of race were solved in the 1960s and 1970s.
Cora Daniels says in the Globe article that the term “ghetto” is “a word that in this country is associated with poor communities of color [used] to now describe something that’s broken up and beaten down.” I myself first heard the term used this way by a student who critiqued the use of plastic knives and forks (as opposed to stainless? silver?) at a Law School social event as “ghetto.”
Inherent racism is an understatement. We are so, so far from understanding how deeply racism is rooted in our culture.
-Bridget Crawford
I fear the problem may be worse that an “inability to understand the inherent racism.” My suspicion is that most college and law school students are perfectly capable of understanding that “ghetto parties” and the like are obviously and grossly racist. They just don’t care. The current generation of undergraduates and law students have grown up their entire lives hearing an endless stream of reactionary tripe about “political correctness” and have, willingly or otherwise, imbibed the notion that racist (or sexist, homophobic, etc.) discourse is somehow rebellious and cool (or whatever the kids say these days).