Dow Jones Sinks, Nation Buries the Word Ghetto
Bear in mind, I had more fun than most lampooning the N-word funeral back when the NAACP thought that was a productive use of their contributors’ money, but now I’m thinking about buying a shovel of my own. I have a big backyard, surely I can find space to inter the remains of g-h-e-t-t-o.
Here is why: the current economy has made GHETTO a non-adjective. When something becomes ubiquitous there’s no longer any need to describe it. So, for instance, people in Kansas don’t go around saying “I had lunch with three of my Kansan co-workers today.”
There was once a point when degreed and salaried black folk pointed a crooked, shame-filled finger at behaviors we deemed inappropriate and hurled the G-word at stereotypical acts in order to deflect any guilt by association. A black person lives way beyond his means? Ghetto. He engages in irresponsible consumption and lives to flash his pseudo-wealth? Ghetto. From where I stand, ghetto is worse than nigger because at least the latter doesn’t give black people an inflated sense of well-being too.
But we’re in the middle of a recession right now because millions of middle class people bought more house than they could afford, because millions of others used home equity as a personal ATM machine to subsidize life styles they really couldn’t afford. And because the CEOs and politicians who are supposed to be the responsible voices around here spent the better part of a decade indulging their addiction to cheap Chinese goods that have artifiicially inflated the value of the dollar. Ever wonder why it is that everyone in America can afford a flat-screen and most Chinese — who are manufacturing them — can’t?
This is all made possible by those hood-ass folk over at Treasury and Citi and Lehman and the good folk in China whose economy is the international equivalent of an E-Z Credit joint in the… um… ghetto. Fittingly, those formerly high-end subdivisions where deer are running amok and swimming pools are the new mosquito nest have become suburban ghettoes. Which, I guess means that we’ll have to retire Ghetto as an adjective because, ironically, the tide of foreclosures ensure’s even more need for it as a noun.
So break out your platinum grills, tattoo your children’s names on your neck and head downtown with rollers in your head: we are all ghetto now.
Tony Comstock
here from TNC. Love this post!
Mar 19, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
Picador
That’s a profound insight. And it’s perfectly consistent with the observation that the American notion of pathological blackness is, in fact, a projection of white America’s own pathologies onto the black Other. Per James Baldwin, white and black Americans resemble nobody else in the world so much as each other, and this makes it easy for white America to create the archetype of the black “N*” (now rebranded as being “ghetto”), having the following characteristics:
- violent
- sex-obsessed
- always looking for money for nothing
- stubbornly self-centered and anti-social
- ignorant
- entitled
In short, it’s a list of characteristics every other nation in the world associates with Americans generally, including (perhaps especially) white Americans.
In the years to come, white Americans will perhaps be forced to face up to the fact that all their wealth in the last few decades wasn’t real money — they were just living “N*-rich”. And maybe some of them will start to understand how the group they’ve been projecting this characteristic onto has been unfairly tarred with that brush.
But more likely, they’ll dig up examples of bad behavior by black people to try to prop up their embattled self-image as the responsible, peaceful, far-seeing, enlightened racial group living on this soil.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
dragnet
Or go one step further and actually blame the niggers for all the problems:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/28/franks_fingerprints_are_all_over_the_financial_fiasco/
Mar 19, 2009 @ 2:51 pm
BabylonSista
Another visitor from TNC’s blog. This is brilliant; if only we had more people saying this before the bottom fell out.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 3:28 pm
AmericanException
Thanks. It seems like we’ve had a selective lens for a really long time, though. I often wondered where we draw the line for the so-called culture of poverty if middle class American kids are academically falling behind their peers in the West and Asia, if prior to the crisis the average American was carrying 6k in credit card debt and 50% of marriages end in divorce. Perhaps it’s more like poverty exacerbates other nation-wide problems?
Mar 23, 2009 @ 12:30 am