Someone Called Me Ghetto

I was called ghetto in an attempt to demean me. I won't get into the detail of how this came about. It's not important. In fact, the person is not important, but the circumstance stands. It was used to belie my identity. Why do people call each other ghetto?

My earliest recollection of the word's origin was in a history lesson about emigrants in New York. My grade school textbook told me a comprehensive story about how the Irish experienced a great potato famine that caused a bulk of their population to immigrate to America, many to the NYC area. It flowed into details about the tension between the Irish and everyone. They were an unwanted and uninvited guest. They stayed to themselves in communities under economic pressure called ghettos. 

My 6th grade classmate asked my teacher why they used that word. That's not what ghetto was to us. Ghetto was the projects and baggy jeans. Ghetto was smacking your tongue and colorful hair. Ghetto was not irish. My teacher explained that ghettos were areas where minorities lived that shared the same social and economic disparity. It was a class issue where the higher class would bully and belittle those minorities so terribly, they had to band together. Ghetto people are people under social pressure and what we were describing were stereotypes. My 11 year old self never forgot this classroom discussion. It became way too apparent that an oppressing group of people used our fashion and language against us, deprecating the very things that made us unique.  

The mind is powerful. We do things almost instinctively out of a matter of survival. I see how a person could be so threatened by another person's nuances that they resort to using blanketing terms to drown out their existence. I feel like that's what the term ghetto is now. It's a term people use on others to refute their identities. I am an unwed mother, I speak with a NY accent, I don't wear labels and I don't comb my hair. I get how someone could take my circumstances and combine them with my natural features and turn it into ammunition. I prefer to use my voice, tell my stories and seldom am I in a situation where I need to code-switch. I take care of myself with out selling myself and although I prefer to be around like minded people, I can spar intellectually with anyone and I live for unraveling complexity. If this is ghetto to anyone, they are actually the "ghetto" ones. By it's evolved definition, it's a person that lacks class and communication skills. If you'd like to still call me ghetto, I'll accept that in terms of it's original definition. I wear my experiences with pride and anyone that wants to band with me and face culture vultures are welcome to join my ghetto neighborhood.