12 Years in the Ghetto

The title of this blog is inspired by Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave which is his own account of being kidnapped and forced to work on a slave plantation for 12 years from 1841-1852. Highly recommended reading in today’s climate of ICE kidnappings. 

Something I’ve noticed over the years is the problematic and harmful ways people around me and in passing speak about “the ghetto” and people they perceive as “ghetto.” There is this sick mix of fascination and repulsion at “the ghetto,” yet people usually know nothing about it, how it functions, have never been, and do not understand the loaded implications of their rhetoric. As someone who has lived and has family who lives in an area in Los Angeles deemed “the ghetto,” I think it is my responsibility as a highly educated and upwardly mobile person to correct these damaging narratives unfairly placed on my neighbors and people who find themselves in this messed up situation. 

First of all, I really need people to understand that no one in the ghetto deserves to be there - not the ex-gang bangers, not the poor kids, not the uneducated, not the old people. Poverty, impoverishment, and impoverished communities are policy choices that politicians choose to enact to maintain a capitalist system. Capitalism relies on underpaying and continuously producing an exploited population of people (remember slavery?). It targets people who are going through a hard time, and traps them in what I call the rat trap of poverty. Notice that it is not that people don’t “work hard.” People in the ghetto are oftentimes, but not always, single mothers and children, undocumented people, American citizens, sick people, disabled, ex- and current gang bangers, post office workers, teachers, cashiers, college graduates, and more. Many of your fav celebrities and Black history figures were born and raised in the ghetto. Anybody and everybody can end up in the rat trap of poverty and the ghetto because it is created by the bottomless pit of greed and wealth theft. All it takes is an unexpected job loss, death, climate disaster, divorce, sickness, or accident and you could be financially ruined living on Coco St. around the corner from me. 

I’m not wishing this on anyone; I need people to understand this so they can stop making assumptions and distancing themselves from people and places they deem “ghetto.” I can speak on this topic because this is what happened to my family. I was born into the middle class. I never had a want for anything growing up. I grew up in a big house in Inglewood with more toys, food, and clothes than I could ever want. I had the most beautiful childhood anyone could ask for. When I was 7, my parents went through a messy divorce. With the loss of my dad’s income, the house became too expensive to maintain and was put in foreclosure. This was when I became a radical Black feminist even though I didn’t have the name for it yet. At my young age, I could not comprehend the validity of a system that would kick a single mother of three out of their home due to lack of finances. There is no excuse, period. It is what guides my activism to this day. I will never accept a system that does not respect the sanctity of mothers and children and people going through a hard time. 

From then on, we were introduced to this ecosystem and rat trap of poverty: jacked up rent, displacement, fast food, storage fees, payday loans, credit scores and credit denial, lemon cars, mismatched furniture, late fees and overdraft bank fees. My childhood was shattered by this predatory and parasitic system that was FOAMING AT THE MOUTH READY to take advantage of our situation. And the way it works is that you own nothing and it continuously eats at your bottom line: all those poor people taxes and punitive fees add up, quickly. Moving fees and gas to and from different places, all while raising three school-age college-bound kids. People think that poor people should just “save” their money and take some "financial literacy classes.” You cannot save money you don’t have. You cannot save money when people are stealing it out of your back pocket. I hope at this point, we are drawing parallels between this and the way slavery and the sharecropping system worked. Ask AI how the sharecropping system worked and you will see that it is a game of take as much as you can and that it functions nearly identically to the rat trap poverty system we see and experience today. Listen to the song, “The World is a Ghetto” by War.  

Stop blaming poor people for being poor. And if you are poor, it is not your fault.

I will forever revere my mom for doing her best to shield us from these systems. Despite all of this violence we encountered, she still managed to protect us from the worst of it and provide a sense of normalcy. We still had fun, maintained our social lives, rarely missed a day of school, still got to participate in the extracurriculars we were interested in, and made it to the colleges we wanted to go to. The strength of Black women is otherworldly, but at the same time she did this because she had to, and she shouldn’t have had to. What is the point of all this? Why, in a land so abundant and so rich in resources, should we have to skimp and scrape for scraps? Especially in the land my family has been in for thousands of years? 

I also want people to understand who owns the ghetto and who maintains the ghetto. Black and poor people do not own properties in the ghetto forreal. Look up the history of the ghetto, and know that people in the ghetto are political prisoners in the war on human beings. So when people who’ve never been in the apartments in the Jungles or Bankhead or the West End and choose to make derogatory comments about what’s ghetto and this and that… I have a problem with it. At the end of the day, I spent my teen and young adult years living in the ghetto. I’m a product of the ghetto. My ghetto neighbors have wished me well throughout my educational journey and sometimes are more decent and real people than some of my silver platter colleagues. 

The same way people simultaneously love and fear the ghetto is the same way people fetishize Black culture. Rarely do people actually immerse themselves around Black people or the ghetto, yet they think they know all about it. I’ve been over it. I was walking through the airport on my way back to Atlanta this weekend, and I heard two different non-Black people make comments using the words “ratchet” and “ghetto.” And hey, ratchet and ghetto is not synonymous with Blackness so get it, I guess. But when I go back to my cushy Ebony Tower of CAU and the AUC, I plan to have less patience with comments like that. I’ve come to realize that these comments often stem from a place of internalized anti-Blackness and shame. People think that poverty is a result of choices and an inherent degeneracy that we can either avoid or “work hard” to overcome. In reality, it’s a matter of chance and circumstance.

Again, you are only one hurricane or death away from Speedy Cash iykyk. And this is how capitalism and poverty works around the world in so-called “poor” countries. They are not poor, they are exploited. Capitalism requires the violence of poverty. How else would egregiously rich people get their money if they weren't stealing it from people? That is why deconstructing systems of poverty and unlearning self-hate needs to be at the forefront of everyone’s activism. The goal of the Dump administration and capitalism in general is to make people believe that it is their fault that they are in their situation, when in reality this is all by design. There is more than enough for everyone and no one should not go hungry, unhoused, and unclothed in this world. Full stop.