Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and the Home of the Shameless

Girl," Tarshel or I would begin, once the phone was picked up, "I just saw the Ghetto Moment of the Day!" And the tale would invariably be about a black, often young, person engaged in some socially or professionally inappropriate or embarrassing act.

A woman at a shoe store yells into her cell phone, "She pregnant again? By who?" Tarshel witnessed that one.

I overhear a young man standing in line at a store yelling into his cell phone, "That nigger in jail again? I just bailed his ass out!"

A man at a gas station tells another after a date, "Man, I'm about to take this bitch home." Tarshel hears that one.

Tarshel is a librarian and a journalism instructor at a two-year college with a mostly black student population. I am a reporter who has covered poor neighborhoods and communities of color for 18 years. And to arrive at these careers, we both had emerged from black childhoods in which limited educational, social and economic opportunities were the norm.

Now comes Cora Daniels's Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and the Home of the Shameless (Doubleday, 2007), which grew out of her own experiences, observations, and analyses. Like Tarshel and me, Daniels was born in the waning years of the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Daniels looks at the everyday, practical matter of living in a racist culture and how difficult it is to resist internalizing that racism.

Ghettonation is as plainspoken as its title, identifying and addressing the practices and practitioners of "ghetto," defined by Daniels as "actions that seem to go against basic home training and common sense." She points out such actions in the streets and in office suites, from New York to Hollywood and everywhere in between.

She even starts us off with a history lesson on the word "ghetto," from Italy to Jewish neighborhoods in Europe to the blighted inner cities of the United States. From there, Daniels then brings us to the current understanding of ghetto, as a noun and primarily, for the purposes of the book, an adjective.

Daniels includes in her definition of ghetto the "common misusage" of the term to mean: "authentic, black, keepin' it real." She suggests that this way of thinking, by those inside and outside America's ghettos, assumes that to be black means to live and think in only one way -- driven by poverty and the unwillingness to speak proper English, among other things. Daniels points out that these are not, nor have they ever been, the experiences of all black people.

Daniels notes that pop culture expects black performers, writers and others to possess a stereotypical identity. She points to the case of the late hip-hop artist Ol' Dirty Bastard, née Russell "Rusty" Jones, who built his career on a biography that included welfare dependence and an absent father, neither of which was true. "So in the name of selling records," Daniels writes, "ODB takes on the character of a black man who grew up on welfare with no daddy because the stereotype is easier for buyers to digest than the reality. In reality, Rusty was the product of a loving mom and pop in a close-knit traditional working-class household in Brooklyn."

She then describes the mainstreaming of ghetto thinking and behavior. As an illustration, she retells the tale of white author James Frey. A Million Little Pieces, Frey's personal story of drug abuse, incarceration and other markers of desperate street life turned out to be largely fictive. In her view, Frey is just one of many celebrities ghettoizing themselves for money. "Remember when folks used to lie their way up?" Daniels asks incredulously. "Now folks are lying their way downward."

In one respect, the criticism of "ghetto" is tricky in that it risks echoing conservative attitudes. Daniels tries to avoid this, but it's an uneven effort.