What "So Ghetto" Really Means

You know when Oprah does that thing where she switches from “white lady Oprah” to “ghetto Oprah?”

This is how Kathy Griffin, in her book Official Book Club Selection, describes the way Oprah Winfrey switches between standard, Midwestern-inflected American English and an accent that illustrates her African-American and Southern roots. Damn! Pick up a book for a little brainless summer reading and get hit with a double dose of racism and classism.

I know. I know. Griffin is a comedian — one I like quite a lot, in fact. But the idea that black = poor and urban = deficient, i.e. "ghetto," is too much a part of the mainstream’s consciousness to be funny. We're long past Merriam-Webster now. "Ghetto" these days doesn't mean merely "a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live because of social, legal or economic pressure." In commonly-used American slang, the word has turned from noun to adjective, and in doing so, has come to illustrate the country's race and class biases.

A look at Urban Dictionary reveals the most popular definitions of "ghetto" invoke not only predominately black, poor, urban areas, but also ideas of "inferior quality." (Or, specifically, the inferior quality of  the culture of poor, black, urban folk.) One definition suggests the word means "jury-rigged" or "half-assed." Another reads like a hackneyed bit from BET's Comic View, describing "ghetto" as "Yelling at your boo in the middle of the street...Dressing for work like you are going to the club...Wearing house slippers outside the house...Flashing money you don't have instead of making your money last...Running from the cops for no reseaon just to see if they can catch you" Some synonyms offered for "ghetto," based on reader-submitted definitions: hood, black, gangsta, nigger, poor, nigga, rap, slang, cool, urban, thug, drugs, cheap, stupid, bitch, pimp, dirty, slut, ugly...

You get the picture, yes?

When Paris Hilton proclaimed a rusty, old truck "so ghetto" on an episode of The Simple Life, she was using language loaded with race and class-related meaning. So, too, was Mary Mitchell, an African American columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, who sparked controversy last month when she debuted a new term for bad parenting: "ghetto parenting."

Mitchell offered examples including "Ghetto parenting is cursing around, and at, a child...Ghetto parenting is brawling with your man or your woman in front of your child...Ghetto parenting is letting your child roam the streets until somebody else’s mother has to tell the child to go home..." Following outcry from people worrying that she was racializing bad parenting, Mitchell responded with a a column entitled "C'mon, you know ghetto when you see it." (The original columns seem to have been taken down from the newspaper's website.) A commenter on Mitchell's Facebook page captured my feelings exactly when he wrote, "Poor inner-city blacks don’t have a corner on this market...Bad and inappropriate parenting is bad and inappropriate behavior. We don’t need to put a black face on this sort of behavior by ascribing qualities or contexts to it that are largely irrelevant." By using the term "ghetto" the way she does, Mitchell both denigrates and narrows the black experience.

And don't even get me started on Griffin's off-hand comment about how Oprah switches from "white lady Oprah" to "ghetto Oprah." Let's take a closer look at what this "ghetto" speech Griffin's describing, shall we?

Many black people do have some degree of an accent that's recognizable as being distinctly African American. But I said accent — not poor diction and not slang. Instead, we're talking about a distinct cadence and way of pronouncing words. For example, some black Midwesterners will extend the word “five” into a drawled “fahve” that reflects roots in the South. In fact, this is a pretty accurate description of what Oprah sometimes does with her speech. What exactly is "ghetto" about this manner of speaking?

I suspect that Griffin meant that Oprah sometimes adopts this accent as a way to better associate herself with people in predominately black, poor, so called "ghetto" urban areas. In the eyes of folk like Griffin, the entire black experience is represented by this "ghetto" universe, which as we know, is seen as inherently deficient. Actually, there's nothing wrong with having a black accent, except that in a society where white is right, a black accent is judged as less than desirable. Making a call without your “white” voice on could mean the loss of a job, an apartment or any number of opportunities. So, as a matter of survival, upwardly mobile blacks learn to effortlessly code switch — that is, unconsciously modify speech to slip from one culture to another. Black people do this in the 'hood and the 'burbs and the halls of power. I do this. President Obama does this. Oprah does this. Don't call it "ghetto;" call it survival in a racially biased society.

No race bias — even when it exhibits itself in casual slang — is inconsequential. The popular use of "ghetto" reinforces the idea of blackness and black people as being somehow "less than." And this leads to real consequences for African Americans. If even Oprah Winfrey, with her accomplishments, talent, fame and money can't escape the "ghetto" label, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Photo Credit: secretlondon123