I really wanted to like Cora Daniels’s latest book, Ghettonation. I wanted to, but I didn’t. And when I condemn the book’s stabs at humor, meandering footnotes, and unnecessary glossary of ghetto-isms it’s not a wry attack on a book I didn’t enjoy. On the contrary, I wanted this book to succeed and found these wearisome attributes to continue to cloud or overcast any relevance I could attain from the text.
Picking up the book for a top-secret project I am partially involved in, I’ll say I had an invested interest in gaining any insight into the concept of “ghetto” from the text. Teaching in South Central, growing up in the past two decades, and simply being immersed in hyper-media youth culture, I felt like I understood what “ghetto” means, but was hoping for a more dynamic, nuanced explanation to phenomena of society’s embrace of all things “ghetto.” After all, this is something I see my students embodying (or at least trying to embody) daily. The gigantic white t-shirt, jeans, and white sneakers is the ghetto uniform 101, with varying accessories optional. This kind of self-reflective paragraph that you, the reader, are currently scanning is exactly the kind of text that makes Ghettonation so frustrating. The personal narrative that Daniels employs is not the best for a universal examination of “ghetto.” The frame is too limited, even through the author’s knowing eyes. Though claiming that “ghetto” is not rooted in a specific class or race, Daniels’ anecdotes and analysis end up legitimizing “ghetto” as predominantly lower class and African American-centric (her examples of Paris Hilton and stomach stapling surgeries not withstanding).
Daniels’ fickle attempts at academic analysis are befuddled and deracinated by attempts at jocularity through “ghetto” vernacular. After lambasting examples of ghetto behavior, Daniels frequently goes for the quick joke by demonstrating her own, occasional (or is that frequent?) ghetto behavior. Nearly every one of these examples is followed by a parenthetical note that, “(I be ghetto).” Cute. Well, it’s cute at least the first time, but the trite utterance is found on nearly every page and, instead of utilizing the juxtaposition as something to build towards an argument, it merely siphons out any heat or momentum an argument may have been gaining.
And then there was the discussion of education. I’ll give credit to Daniels for properly enunciating that “ghetto” is an embracement of low expectations; this is something that frustrates my curriculum daily. I have numerous students wanting nothing more than a “D” in my class so they can graduate – no other aspirations. But what about the hegemonic, class-ist structures that bar our students from success like … oh, say, No Child Left Behind? Daniels has exactly this much to say on the legislation:
“The federal law requires schools to publicly report their performance data for the first time by race and ethnicity. Schools that do not produce acceptable text scores for all students are punished with a variety of economic sanctions.”
That’s it.
In fact, 150 pages into the book (which itself is just shy of 200 pages in length) I was ready to finally give up. But the latest chapter’s title was “School Me” and I knew – I knew – that this was going to be filled with intellectual gems. And what did I learn here? I learned that, according to Daniels, the problem with our educational system can be summed up by the fact that our students are “living for the moment” and not worried about their futures (see, low expectations). But is that it?? Why isn’t the past invoked here? What about the fact that our students have had probably a decade’s worth of shoddy teachers by the time they graduate? That the school system – at least in an urban “high poverty, high minority” area (as official district data likes to call it) – deliberately frustrates and breaks our students. That the bridge from schools to prisons is seen daily as I watch student after student handcuffed in front of the school for laws like jaywalking and truancy?
I realize I’m ranting here (it’s a blog, after all), but it’s frustrating to see NCLB reduced to a sentence that doesn’t at all encapsulate what this fiasco is all about. It’s also frustrating to see Daniels’ reductionism about why are kids are failing.
Finally, my biggest qualm about Ghettonation is its lack of really adding anything to “the discourse” as the phrase has been thrown around. In page 192 in the book, Daniels writes, “The time has come for the death of ghetto.” However, Daniels never really convinced the reader that ghetto was “bad” or something that can even be signaled easily and exterminated (“I be ghetto,” remember?). Daniels begins and ends her book with the same aphorism: “I am ghetto. I am not ghetto. I am you.” I don’t get it. I realize this is supposed to be the profound, oh snap, there is no spoon, cut the red wire or blue wire, it was Col. Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick reveal, but it doesn’t mean anything. Daniels conveniently dances around any reasonable challenges, explanations, or critique by figuratively shrugging her shoulders and saying that ghetto is everywhere and nowhere. Slick. If you’re going to write a book called Ghettonation and, at the end of it, you are going to call for “the death of ghetto,” why wouldn’t you actually explain what “ghetto” means, why it is bad, and how to “kill” it? I ask these questions out of frustration. As I said, I really wanted for this book to give me answers – I’ve been grappling with the “ghetto” issue as well.
Ultimately, I’m inclined to think that “ghetto” is class and race based. Even when Daniels pointed to celebs acting ghetto, you have to remember the romantic allure of the lower class. Jarvis Cocker of Brit pop band Pulp sang it best:
“Sing along with the common people,
sing along and it might just get you through,
laugh along with the common people,
laugh along even though they’re laughing at you,
and the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.”
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