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Regardless of the bad press, the reported, miss reported and under reported deprivation, the pot-holed roads you could lose Mini in, the ex crack houses that are given face lifts and passed on to lone parents with one kid or refugees with five, regardless of the crime and drugs, the noise and drama, there still is nowhere more life filled than the inner city.
Donny Hathaway was right when he said “Everything is everything” in the ghetto. Consequently it has become common place for street culture and area culture to name and proudly claim ghetto status for the estates and communities in which some live and the rest hang out.
It’s the life of the so called and defiantly, ‘Ghetto’ that causes the inner city to produce the ‘Ghetto Fabulous and Tragic’ life styles, and individuals, who pursue the pre-packaged, musically glamorised, socially accepted, fashion endorsed, and media romanced caricature that has become Ghetto life. It’s that ‘ghetto life’, that has produced the multi-platinum selling Rap and RnB stars here and abroad, who rose up out of the Ghettos that gave birth to their voice and expressions, propelling them to prophet like prominence. They speak of the life ‘On road’ and all the drama that comes with it; the girls and the guys that were too nasty to either dick or ding, the whites they shot or the greens they blazed, the ends they made and the friends they lost, the police they ran from and the bird they did, the dads that were never there and the mums who never let them down, the school education they gave up for street education and the baby mothers who had no education, the corners where mans’ got jacked and wrecked, the West Indian take-away that acted like they were doing you a favour taking your money, the DJ’s they killed and the haters that stole their lyrics, all made up the life that was to them ghetto life. Life was ghetto and ghetto was fabulous, ghetto fabulous.
The ‘Tragic’ aspect of ghetto life, I believe all will agree, is the rise of ‘Whites’ in both its powder and rock forms. The mindless violence that follows cocaine like an STD you can’t get rid of, and the break down of seemingly any and all types of value systems that once appeared to hold communities together, albeit by a sometimes very thin tread, are all faces of the tragic. The tragic is seen in the fact that when young people start smoking they now enter at the ‘green house crew’ and not the 10 B&H crew of, yesterwhen? The tragic is seen in the adoption of a ‘me only’ value system, which renders everyone and everything ‘a nothing’ of any significance. The tragic is seen in the imagistic prostitution of young women by a ‘black-culture hungry’ white music industry, and the accompanying Pimpification of young males, all of whom stand with six pack in one hand and ‘meat and two veg’ in the other. The tragic is seen in the increased educational drop out rate of young men and women living in ‘the ghetto’, opting instead for the, ‘only a punk needs an education’ classes being taught on street corners everyday. The tragic is seen in the Afros that have no meaning, the Cane rows that only raise cane, and the pants swung low exposing fake men and false manhood. The tragic is seen in the perpetuation of this ghetto bubble by those that may have been fortunate enough to break out of their ghetto prison, but still glorify it, like they really do want to get back there. The ‘real tragic’ is that ‘ghetto fabulous’ is presented as the only true way ‘we live’ whomever ‘the we’ of the ghetto may be, especially the ‘Black we’.
For me, as a watcher of street culture, the greatest tragedy is that the ‘tragic’ are glamorised as the fabulous and the real ‘ghetto fabulous’ are totally lost sight of.
I see the real ghetto fabulous everyday; I work with and for them. The truly ghetto fabulous despite their environments and backgrounds, break all the moulds and buck the trends of the streets, the stereotypes, the negative imaging, bad policing, peer pressure and what ever else bears down on them. They’re not saints, they just don’t blaze, and they don’t shot whites or greens or blues or turquoises, or magentas… They do perform well in school and don’t have babies before they’re old enough to own a provisional license. They don’t get arrested, even if it’s a family tradition.
The areas they live in may be ruff and the estates rougher still, but it does not reflect on who they are, who they are becoming and eventually will be. There are mothers and fathers there who are raising balanced, stable, good children against all the odds and in spite of their situations. They’ve turned ‘set backs’ into ‘set ups’ and ‘no ways’ into ‘my ways’. These people, (whom we overlook, in our mad rush to glamorise and stereotype the worse of what the ghetto is), are the real ghetto fabulous and we must never forget this.
The real ghetto tragic, whether they do so willingly or from ignorance, are those who everyday buy into the life ‘the road’ has become and see it as life’s only way. The tragic believe and perpetuate a stereotyped, manufactured, perceived black culture and continue to glamorise it as the real ghet-te-o. They embrace the stereotypes and live them; they view Jail as the new male right of passage and seek nothing but ‘ends and bling’ as their external confirmation of power and success. The tragic are those who have broken out, mainly via the music trap and continue to ensnare the minds and lives of the masses still ‘on road’ by not telling the full story, and building a positive bridge for others to follow out on.
The fabulous and the tragic are always with us, we’ve just been looking at them and the rest of the street culture through Elton John looking specs and the picture’s all wrong. I was once told by an English professor that ‘if all a person has is perception, then that perception becomes their reality’. From all outward appearances it seems clear where present perception is. Our task is to reveal the alternative reality that already exists within our communities regardless of the present perception and change that perception by affirming and celebrating that alternative reality. We are to affirm the truly ghetto fabulous wherever we find them, while opening a door of hope to the tragic, knowing that the conditions and people that produce ghettos will always remain. As a society, we must never become complacent in ridding ourselves of those conditions, but must always reject the idea that those conditions cannot produce the multi racially fabulous that presently live there.
As a black pastor, leader, educational consultant, husband father and man, looking at the cultural landscape and interacting at ground level with a varying amount of young people, I am uncomfortably conscious that our major crime against this present generation, has been in developing a value suspect, non- directional perceived cultural package that they have no power to control or manage. Many if not all the young people we work with, on one level or another are infected by this whole sense of dislocation from a set of directional and inclusive values that act as building blocks of self image and maturity. I remain very stubborn about young people finding alternatives to their present plights and not options, which in my understanding is merely a different choice of the same thing.
Out of the ‘How to Be a Player’ workshop and ‘Food for da brain’ we’ve developed 7 directional and inclusive values that help to focus the men and women we work with. We call it ‘7 definitions of a man and woman’
They take seriously their responsibilities
One of the hallmarks of maturity is the taking seriously the responsibilities we have placed upon us. They learn through the process of social interaction, friendship and mentoring to ‘handle their business’ not try to pass it on or side step it. They see it by the example of others and by being taught how to manage their own responsibilities.
Does not live for the moment only
It was Mohammed Ali who once said “If you do at 30 what you were doing at 15, you’ve wasted 15 years”. The pressure for this present generation is to live for today ‘cause tomorrow you die’ and the music and street culture that they’re daily caught up in reinforces this whole mindset. They do not think long term because they see no long-term picture to work toward. So while encouraging them to live in the moment and enjoy it to the full, we stair their minds toward a long term picture of their lives, with goals and vision casting and general belief that what their minds can conceive with hard work they can achieve.
Has a deep sense of self-respect and respect for others.
The homophobia and misogyny prevalent in popular black culture along with a disregard of any and all authority, backed up by a legal system that defends the indiscretions of youth rather that holding them responsible for the decisions they make, has produced in them a self-respect that is affirmed in the demise and humiliation of someone else. When self-image is shot the image of others follows suit and rises no higher than the false image you have of self. Hence it is imperative that they begin to see others from a new sense of self-respect. Reflecting back on them all the sexist, racist, homophobic, and stereotypically obvious stereotypes that they have developed and flippantly use without thinking, enables them to see that the a truer sense of self worth comes with the understanding of another persons worth.
Does not settle for 2nd best in their personal development.
It has become thankfully hard for young people to fall out and settle for 2nd best because there are a few more services available here and there, than of late. But if settling for 2nd best is part of the mindset then no amount of services that do not address this issue will help them. All we do is to encourage them that at what ever level they find themselves educationally, vocationally, spiritually, personally or otherwise, be the best at that level with the view to rising to the next level in personal maturity.
Willing to stand up and be counted.
It was Martin Luther King Jr who said, “Until you have found something for which you are willing to die, your not yet fit to live”. We’re not asking young people to go die for something, but we are asking them to live for something outside of the everyday ‘same old same old’. We want them to become attune to the world outside of their area and borough. They must be allowed to feel like they are part of a whole bigger picture of life, with the confidence and skills to interact with it on a level footing.
Willing to love and be loved.
Love has become a culturally, politically, racially, and individually charged and loaded word. It’s a dice that no one wants to role but everyone wants to gamble with, a tune that we’re all sick of but a sad song we all secretly love to sing. So much, maybe too much, emphasis is placed on being sexually sensible among young people, without the counter balance of being emotionally mature. Its almost as if we’re expecting the two to naturally go hand in glove, an assumption we make to their peril. At least 80% of black child born today are from single parent homes. Now before you think that I’m getting on some moral high horse about single/lone parents, let me just qualify that I’m the youngest of ten kids, nine living and my mum hand to raise the last five of us on her own, one girl and four sons with me at the end of the pile. She worked two jobs to keep us all together, so I ain’t even trying to go there! Once my father left the family home- I was 6 yrs. old at the time, I’m 42 now- my mother never brought another man under the roof of our house, not in deference to my father but due to the fact that once was and 10 kids were enough. Hence I, like most of the present generation of young people, have never seen an emotionally stable and functioning relationship between two parents modeled for me. The kind that builds emotional maturity and acts as a model to work with, rather than the total break down we see all around us. It’s about helping them to form, emotional identities and relational priorities as much as it is reminding them to carry a pack of condoms when they go raving.
Never “Punks Out” on life.
In his book the road less traveled M. Scott Peck opens with these words:
Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. (Peck 1978, p15)
The difficulty of life many of our young people know first hand in ways greater than those of us who work with them. It becomes more difficult when you don’t know how to mange its difficulties and deal with its cruelness. It is all too easy to give up (‘punk out’ on life’s dreams, goals and aspirations when it all goes pear shaped, however the truth that they are made to learn is, that’s exactly how life is. They can do their utmost best and life’s unpredictability comes along and kicks them in the asse and stamps in their face and they lose heart because they think that they failed. They learn that they can’t ‘go around thinking that the world owns you something cos your’re here’ as the Stable Singers said, but that failure is not from trying and finding out that it didn’t work but in not trying at all.
‘Ways forward’ taken from Manqoba ©2004
