…the structure of Platonic discourse itself forced those who used it to accept a particular concept of social order. … In the very syntax of our speech as we learn the English language, the justification of our ‘inferiority’ is embedded, and, what is more, we accept that fact as we ‘master’ the language.
-Dr. Marimba Ani, Yurugu

I will argue the negative. I do not say it. Gently the ancestors remind me, each time I hear the phrase, never to repeat it. Yet, somehow we know this. It whispers to us, if only but in a still small voice, its malevolence. Somehow the historical memory of our past glories and present indignities inform our moral consciousness of its malevolent subjectivity. We engage in escapades of white liberality hoping to expedite the dolor and shame, telling ourselves that “these are just words; only words.” But the provenance of this instinct places it outside of us. We have learned it from another: “an” – “other.” We have learned to dismiss the shame. When and where we can no longer hide it, we deploy discursive maneuvers of misdirection. Though we so often fail at signifying, yet we must. Our colonizer has imposed his language. And with this imposition came his ontology, his ways of being for us, about us, in us. We are not what we think we are. We take flight in hopes that we shall evade his vitriolic imaging of us. And our fear is legitimate because we know that for 500 years he has made it manifest, even upon our varied and beautiful bodies.

“That’s ghetto!” we say. This statement is truncated in the audible. It is rarely complete in its speaking. In truth what we mean is “That’s ghetto! That’s not me.” We do not remember Africa but we remember the plantation. And when we left the plantation we stepped into a ghetto. But then we find the ghetto, like the plantation before it, so very hard to leave — or do I mean escape? When we live in pleasant places and move, we say that we “left.” When we live in ghettos and move we say that we “got out.” One does not leave a ghetto, one must “get out,” right?

G-h-e-t-t-o… G-h-e-t  to… Get to… GET TO!

As in GET TO another place!

But where?

Any place is better than here!

To say that something is “ghetto” is to suggest, indeed directly imply, that it is the cultural progeny of an obstreperous and debased group. We imagine that this group, uncivilized and immodest, has taken normative codes of behavior bequeathed to them by socioeconomic superiors and bastardized them. Thus, one can look ghetto, talk ghetto, act ghetto, and conclusively be ghetto. In this way, we continue to allow ourselves to — as my indigenous ancestors would assert — speak with the white man’s tongue. The master’s language is the master’s tool. It will form for him what he has desired and work only in his interest. It was designed for this purpose.

Like Africans “singing” in Congo Square, like African laments in the cotton fields of despair. In d e s p a i r. For Africans the English language has always been a New World lexicon to facilitate our soul’s expression. We have found it woefully inadequate. Yes, we have. We fight it. We use it to create our Ebonic. We play with it. We morph it. We assign our own meanings. And try as we might, the colonizer’s voice yet ricochets inside our heads like a 500-year-long echo. Like the Lion King, we have forgotten who we are; content only to be not that… that… “ghetto” thing.

Occultation of the conflicts of interest is gained in their reduction from being struggles of highly complex matrices of power to comprehensible categories of ‘natural’ difference. The overbearing motif of this occultation is the exclusion of the African from the space of Western history, and the marginal inclusion of the Negro as negativity.
-Ronald Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon

For Judy occultation exists as a binary. It does much more than hold two divergent ideas at opposite ends of a spectrum, rather it conceals the one to displace the other. Here essentialized African-American never escapes the ghetto in the minds of the white masses. “Ghetto” becomes a reinscription, ever recasting African-Americans into the stereotypes created for them. What is more, they are expected to fit themselves into that space.

Spacial politics, that is, a group’s perceived social ownership of corporate space, is germane to any discussion of ghetto naming. Fundamental to owning slaves was the concomitant proprietorship of their environments, thoughts, and progeny. This is why Special Field Order #15 (Forty acres and a mule) was never going to materialize. The notion of turning land over to a former enslaved population, indeed a population who just prior did not own even their very bodies, was anathema in the minds of whites — even northern whites. This is why no one flinched when minorities were losing their homes in the mortgage crisis. This is why American banking institutions made sure, very sure, that Black soldiers returning home from WWII could not take full benefit of their G.I. Bills the way white soldiers could. This is why red lining was the law of the land. White American social cosmology, as if peering through a telescope, could see no spacial bodies for Blacks, save that of the ghetto. And these ghettoized spaces become the exotic, voyeuristic playgrounds for non-ghetto dwellers. Like visitors at a zoo, they gaze upon the tiger, marveling at her strength, astonished by her grace, in awe of her dignity, stunned by her natural beauty, all the while imagining that this zoo is somehow an appropriate place for her, and that she is happy there.

…white people understand this. If you cannot understand what is like to be a tiger in a zoo, I don’t know how you eva gon’ understand what it’s like to be a nigga in America.
-Kat Williams, It’s Pimpin‘ Pimpin‘

When someone utters, “that’s so ghetto,” realize they are issuing a proxy accusation which is embedded with meaning similar to the dehumanizing colonial settler ideas Fanon talked about. The speaker, in effect, declares People of Color…

…insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality.
-Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[A Poem]

We change nouns into verbs.

But they still things even when they mere words.

Is that what I heard, or is that what you said?

Are those just words, or your voice in my head?

Get out of my head! Get off my mind!

You been in there a proper long time!

“No, I cannot. I will go, and I will come.

For I am not only in your head, I also live on your tongue.”

-Marco

And when they do, simply recriminate:
-What is a ghetto?
-Where did it come from?
-Who owns it?
-How is its existence perpetuated?
-Who lives there?
-How did they get there?
-How do they leave?

Marco McWilliams is an educator, writer and Pan Africanist. He writes from Providence and will pursue a Ph.D. in 2012.