Ghetto Is As Ghetto Does

Until a month ago, I did not think that I lived in “the ghetto.” North Minneapolis, the inner city, and even, on occasion, the ’hood—but not the ghetto. However, that was before a string of troubling incidents occurred in my neighborhood—and before I got some surprising reactions to them from some of my South Minneapolis friends. I’ve seen first-hand what happens when urban geography, race, and our notions of individual self-worth get mixed together.

“Ghetto” derives from the name of an island near Venice where Jews were forced to live in the 1500s. Now, according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a ghetto is a “thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social or economic restrictions, pressures or hardships.”

Things started to get strange a few weeks ago when I asked some of the young men in my neighborhood about the dramatic increase in cars parked near my home at odd hours and often with suspicious-looking passengers. I made it clear to these men that I would report any drug dealing or other criminal activity to the police.

A few days later, a young African-American man approached me as I was headed to work. “I heard you were asking about drug dealing around here,” he said. “Nobody is dealing drugs. But you gotta understand—you live in the ghetto.”

I was just a little perplexed. “I live in the ghetto? What does that mean? Am I supposed to accept trash in my yard, open drug dealing, and general mayhem because of my ZIP code? People in Linden Hills or Kenwood don’t have to put up with this.”

“Brother, you don’t live in Linden Hills or Kenwood.”

“Fair enough,” I replied, “but my parents placed their lives on the line in Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement so that black people could live in decent neighborhoods. I am not going to disrespect our struggle as a people by accepting that kind of defeatist thinking.”

Then our eyes locked for a moment, each looking at the other with mutual bemusement. He clearly did not understand me, and I surely did not understand him. Did I challenge his expectations of what he and other Northsiders were entitled to from their surroundings? He probably thought I was setting the bar too high with my Kenwood comparisons, and I thought his ghetto comments provided an excuse for condoning subpar living conditions and bad behavior.

Less than thirty-six hours later, a ten-pound rock crashed through my living-room window at three o’clock in the morning. Was there a connection? Was I being punished for being too bourgeois and not accepting the consequences of my geographic place?

When I told two of my best friends, both Southsiders, I thought that they would surely empathize. Instead, I got lectured about “ghetto life” and strongly encouraged to “git while the gettin’ was good” to the relative safety of South Minneapolis. “I warned you about messing around with those Northside Negroes,” one told me. “They don’t look at the world the same way you and I do. You are dealing with men who don’t value their own lives, let alone yours.”

My other ABC (“ace boon coon,” Southern lingo for close personal friend) largely agreed. “You’ve got a choice to make,” he began. “If you don’t do anything else, they probably won’t either. Don’t start a neighborhood block group, don’t write about this in your column, and for God’s sake, do not challenge them again. Next time, you might just really piss them off. Inside your own home, say whatever you want, but do not ruffle their feathers by trying to impose your view of appropriate behavior on them. Accept that you live in a ghetto, populated with bad people who, if pushed, will do bad things to you.”

However, I am not going to ignore trash in my yard and criminal activity on my street because of my address. I strongly encourage my fellow “Northside Negroes”—and Northside Hmong, Latino, and all the other hyphenated Americans—to have zero tolerance for bad behavior. We’ve got to let the bad boys and girls know that the heat is on. We all deserve what people in Kenwood and Linden Hills take for granted—clean, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.