It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (6 page)

It is this type of rhetoric and these decisions by culture makers that has caused “Black” to become synonymous with the “reel ghetto.” It is like a person who is seeking to become something that he is not because he is so worried that he will not be accepted by the masses as real. But real is as real believes and lives. You can find it anywhere. Julie Dash, the filmmaker responsible for such works as
Daughters of the Dust
and
The Rosa Parks Story
, reminds me that, “Our lives, our history, our present reality is no more limited to ‘ghetto’ stories than Italian Americans are to the Mafia, or Jewish Americans are to the Holocaust.”

In an article by social commentator Harold Clemens entitled “‘Ghetto’—The New N-Word,” he describes this usurpation of the Black experience. He writes that the word “ ‘ghetto,’ when used colloquially as an adjective, is the most racist, derogatory word in the common lexicon, given its so subtle insinuations and layers. Employed to mean ‘uncouth,’ ‘unruly,’ or ‘parvenu,’ ‘ghetto’ is the most popular new code word to stigmatize blacks.” He goes on:

The ghetto experience in our history in America is an important one, mainly because it represents our historic and contemporary socioeconomic struggles for liberation. Because the reel ghetto experience has been highly profitable, it has left all Blacks—in the ghetto or outside of it—feeling inauthentic. The reality is that young, nonviolent Black men are born into a world that has already pegged them as violent criminals. Further, they treat and mistreat them based on this falsehood. It’s no surprise then that many youths explained their decision to act out as a giving-in of sorts to a reality that is fixed. The mentality becomes, “If you’re going to treat me like a criminal, I may as well get what I can get,” because ultimately both fates are the same. My brother and ODB became what society viewed them as, which is always unfortunate.

When I see young people like Alyce Bush, the founder of Roots to Freedom, a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an alternative to the negative images that sabotage our reality, I’m hopeful that we will find a rhythm that helps those of us who have sought authenticity through combing through the most inauthentic places.

In Richard Wright’s
Black Boy
, Bigger Thomas remarks, “Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it.” My brother, ODB, and countless others felt that they could not challenge the perceptions. One does not have to go along with any image imposed upon them by the outside. We are not simply to be acted upon; in
some real senses we are actors ourselves, making the world go ’round, and choosing to be what we choose to be. Poet Saul Williams reminds us that “Right now, we are unable to imagine world peace. Why? Because our imaginations have been stolen from us. We can imagine World War III because we’ve seen it in every movie, every TV show, etc. We cannot imagine world peace because we’ve never seen it before.” If it’s not up to the post-hip-hop generation to create alternatives that will reveal their infinite possibilities, then who will produce these images?

Tupac once told us, “Stop being cowards and let’s have a revolution, but we don’t wanna do that. Dudes just wanna live a caricature, they wanna be cartoons, but if they really wanted to do something, if they was that tough, all right, let’s start a revolution.” That revolution may not be televised, but with the advent of digital and Web technology, the post-hip-hop generation is utilizing forms of new media to challenge, discover, and influence how we think about our world.

First off, thanks for granting me this interview.

No problem. It’s time for me to set the record straight.

About…?

About me. Who I am. And actually, more importantly, why I am who I am.

See, people who live in me know me on an intimate and visceral level, while people who live elsewhere probably know what I look like. However, most of these folks, residents and nonresidents alike, don’t understand who I really am.

Is it important that they know who you really are?

Is it important? It’s essential. Imperative. Especially for the post-hip-hop generation. They are going to be the ones whose decisions will
affect me the most. They’ve been fed a hyperrealistic, inadequate portrait of who I am and if not dealt with it will cause confusion and vital opportunities will be lost. Basically, they need to understand me in order to fully understand themselves.

All right then, so, who are you? Who is the African-American ghetto?

I’m a place where people are and have historically been forced to live.

Which people?

All types of people: brilliant, courageous, beautiful, crazy, funny, talented, strong, injured, soulful. All types. Geeks. Shoemakers. Scholars. Comedians. Athletes. Scientists. Lovers. The whole spectrum.

The common denominator is that they’re economically poor and African-American.

I’m curious about your name, “Ghetto.” What does it mean? Where does it come from?

Linguists trace it back to the Italian words
“getto”
(to cast off) and
“borghetto”
(small neighborhood), the Venetian slang “gheto,” the Griko
“ghetonia”
(neighborhood), and the Hebrew word
“get”
(bill of divorce).

The first time my name was written was when English traveler and writer Thomas Coryat, on a foot journey through Europe, described “the place where the whole fraternity of the Jews dwelleth together, which is called the Ghetto.”

And what year was that?

1611.

Early in its usage it meant a walled-off and gated section in cities where Jews were confined. The word was mostly used in Italy, near port cities like Venice where a lot of Jews lived and worked. Jews were
placed under strict regulations, forced to live together, and put on curfews that prevented them from being out at certain times. As if that wasn’t enough, sumptuary laws forced Jews to wear special starshaped yellow badges and yellow berets, identifying themselves as Jews and opening themselves up to taunts and attacks by Christians who were the majority.

Damn. Did other writers back in the day write about your name?

Yeah, lots. In 1879, British writer Dean Farrar writes about the ghetto in
Life of St. Paul
. Edward Dowden, a nineteenth-century literary critic, makes many references to ghettos in his analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley. British author Israel Zangwill wrote the books
Children of the Ghetto
and
Dreamers of the Ghetto
, both biographical studies. In 1908, Jack London in
Martin Eden
explains that his characters “plunged off right into the heart of the working-class ghetto.” Despite its usage by these writers, it wasn’t widely discussed or popular.

When did it become widely known?

The word blew up in the mid-1930s when the Nazis took power and set up ghettos that, just like in previous times, confined Jews into cramped, tightly packed areas of the inner cities of Eastern Europe. However, unlike previous ghettos in Europe, these ghettos were impoverished, overcrowded, and disease-plagued areas enclosed by stone or brick walls, wooden fences, and barbed wire. And, if Jews tried to leave, the penalty was death.

So it was death either way?

Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official, came up with what he called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” a program of systematic genocide that attempted to eradicate the entire Jewish population in Europe. In preparation, Eichmann began to move all Jews
into ghettos. The Nazis, between 1939 and 1945, set up more than three hundred Jewish ghettos in the Soviet Union, the Baltic states, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. During the Holocaust, nearly all the Jews in the ghettos were killed—so yes, death either way.

Do you see yourself as being related to those Jewish ghettos of Europe?

Of course. Take the Warsaw ghetto, as an example of institutional overcrowding, where Jews, who were 30 percent of the population, were forced to live in 2.4 percent of the city’s area—about ten people per room. Most apartments had no sanitation, piped water, or sewers. Starvation was rife.

So, similarly, during my birth in America, Urban Renewal (which, behind closed doors, was called “nigger removal”) was all about systematically uprooting Blacks from sections of the city deemed “valuable,” then forcing them into projects. For every ten homes that they destroyed, they only built one new unit in the projects—institutional overcrowding.

Many things are the same: the social isolation; the normalized terror by authorities; and state-sponsored racism, to name a few.

And what about other ghettos around the world—do you see yourself as related to them?

Of course. Every ghetto—from Soweto to L’île-Saint-Denis, from Brixton to Chiapas, from favelas to shantytowns—I am one with.

Why?

’Cause oppression is oppression is oppression, man.

Some people say that you’re a “state of mind”?

Which people?

Um —

I say survival is a state of mind. That’s where soul comes from.

And what’s soul?

Soul is graceful survival against impossible circumstances.

That’s heavy. All right now, can you talk about your roots as the Black American ghetto?

Definitely.

All right, so, 40 Acres & A Mule is not just the name of Spike Lee’s film company, it’s also the colloquial term for the reparations that were supposed to be issued to enslaved Africans after the Civil War—forty acres of farmland and a mule to cultivate that land. The official name was Special Field Orders, No. 15, and it was issued on January 16, 1865, by Maj. Gen. William Sherman.

So what happened?

Well, when President Abraham Lincoln was killed, Andrew Johnson, his replacement, revoked Sherman’s orders. The very few Blacks who had already received land had it quickly taken away.

Abolishing slavery with no restitution is like opening the door to a prison cell, while leaving all other exits bolted, chained, and locked, and telling an inmate that “they are free.” The cell door, although perhaps the most confining, is but a multitude of forces that keeps the prisoner imprisoned.

Anyway, without any restitution, Blacks were forced into a vicious cycle of sharecropping, also known as Slavery II, where they paid rent to white landowners from their yearly yield. This form of neoslavery also occurred later in South Africa and Zimbabwe where it was illegal for Blacks to own their own land. Sharecropping is a vicious cycle because, by the end of the year without fail, the sharecropper is always
in debt, meaning he can never free himself from the land. This, coupled with de-citizenizing Jim Crow laws, made it impossible for Blacks to own land in the South, binding them—through the law—in the shallow pits of poverty.

That was in the South. What about in the North?

Around the times I just mentioned, 1865–1876, Blacks comprised less than 5 percent of industrial northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, et cetera. Blacks in the North, because of racism and discrimination, weren’t allowed to work in factories or join unions, which reduced them to the lowest, dirtiest, grimiest, nastiest jobs—jobs no one else would do.

Beginning around 1914, though, large numbers of Blacks started moving to industrial hubs like New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Maryland, Detroit, Chicago, et cetera.

Because things were so bad in the South?

It was
“so
bad” everywhere. But mainly because World War I, which began in 1914, called for a lot of unskilled factory workers. And you know when America needs weapons, they don’t care who makes ’em.

Blacks kept coming North, looking for work, even after the war was over. During the twenties alone, over two million Blacks came North in hopes of a better life. You had a lot of Blacks looking for work in an already impossible job market, then the Depression hits.