ETHOS

By Chloe Wayne

“Although there are often forces in the community which can counteract the negative influences, by far the most powerful being a strong, loving, “decent”…family committed to middle-class values, the despair is pervasive enough to have spawned an oppositional culture, that of “the streets,” whose norms are often consciously opposed to those of mainstream society.” — Elijah Anderson, “The Code of the Streets,” The Atlantic (May 1994)

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I hate reading about “welfare queens.” I hate reading about black men with more bullets in their bodies than years in their lives. I hate reading about pregnant 14-year olds—I hate reading about what we (all the way over here) think of the “ghetto” (all the way over there). Commentary on the “ghetto” is so often laced with political or moral agendas that are dangerously reductive and all but preclude the possibility of meaningful exploration and analysis. And what is worse, there exists a multidimensional (moral, cultural, geographical) distance that paralyzes us as observers or actors. Unless the consequences of this distance are recognized, we will continue to limit the validity of our observations, and our depictions will be muddled in faulty translation.

Really, Dr. Anderson? You did not find that dichotomy– “decent” vs. “the streets”– problematic? He repeatedly emphasizes that the “residents themselves” use this term– as if he can preemptively shield himself from an imminent swarm of denunciations. As if readers would not recognize the problem of extrapolating use of the term “decent” to the Black poor at large.

So many “studies” of the ghetto immediately locate it as separate and different. I suppose it is impossible to view an entity as heterogeneous when we judge from afar, or toe the boundary to take a quick ethnographic “peek” to substantiate our claims. We arm ourselves with statistics and our handy-dandy notions of morality to judge ‘their’ behavior—but this is where science and morality fail. Drug addicts, murderers, and Bloods are not numbers and statistics. And analyses that seek to compare and reconcile two entities at odds (one good, one evil) often do so prematurely.

To the first point, “the ghetto” that people often speak of is simply a homogenizing appellation (like “the Orient”), and our quantitative analyses are often useful but reductive. To truly understand something, we cannot just observe the structural conditions in which its inhabitants are immersed, analyze statistics taken from random samples to represent the mean disposition of the aggregate, and then impose our understanding of how “society” or an “economy” functions as a bottom line to which their “marginal” universe must adapt and adjust. To the second point, people’s intent on “fixing” something of which they have no extended firsthand knowledge seems silly. So often, analysts fail to acknowledge their distance from their subjects—or perhaps, they simply fail to recognize that this distance must be traversed! Thus, the implicit claims to authenticity in many ethnographic studies are rendered invalid.

Another problem is the tendency to “study” the ghetto with the intention of comparing it to how “normal” American society works, thus reinscribing its location as marginal. What if a Venn diagram representation of the “mainstream” and the “marginal” prevailed?

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What if everyone exploded the binary opposition that vertically stratifies the two? Though one may view the marginal as a subcomponent of a larger mainstream, it is only so in a historical sense—that is, it is a product of the historical society that also created today’s mainstream. Thus, neither should be viewed as absolutely central. What necessarily follows from absolutely discrete division is marginalization: one entity is deemed absolutely less important, so even in analyzing the “less important” entity, the views, norms, assumptions, and epistemologies of the “more important” entity govern the conclusions we come to. Of course, situationally, either one can be viewed as a backdrop—or an element/subcomponent—to analyze the other. It seems, however, that the all too frequent voice of the mainstream has obscured that of the marginal, creating in the minds of the mainstream a faulty assumption of its virtual absence. The realities of the ghetto have been relegated to “theoretical” domain, and our neglect implicitly (and INACCURATELY) suggests that we need not reckon with these tangible, dynamic communities that do face very real consequences on account of our daily choices and decisions.

The Freireian revolutionary leader, while conceding that he or she plays an indispensable role in the uplift of the people, refuses to submerge the consciousnesses of its students by rendering them mere “depositories,” inactive objects in their own liberation. Freire notes that “many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account the men-in-a-situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed” (75). Similarly, we will never succeed at “fixing” or even studying the ghetto from a moral, cultural, and spatial distance. How can policy get anywhere if an elite, highly credentialed minority believes its static conception of the ghetto—as a morally bankrupt, socially unstable Frankenstein’s monster of sorts—to be a sensible context in which to situate these actors it intends to “save” or “fix”? Even semantically, and often without intending to, we prime ourselves to view the ghetto in such a way that not only situates it as distant and separate, but places it in dialectical opposition to us. Words like marginal, deviant, impoverished, crime- or drug-ridden, are terms that refer to the ghetto in oppositional relation to our own. Can you call something “x-ridden” without an “entity with less x” to which to compare it? To characterize something as marginal or deviant, this necessary comparison occurs.

The fact (in itself) that our denotation is sovereign stands as proof of this power imbalance. As Friedrich Nietzche noted in his “Genealogy of Morals,” “the lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say ‘this is this and this.’” While this point may be obvious, do the “educated” theorists, critics, and policymakers sufficiently trouble how this skews perspective? This is not to say that the aforementioned terms (and ones like them) should not be used, or to say that such characterizations are inaccurate – whether they should/should not be, whether they are/are not accurate is beside the point. I simply wonder if our semantic choices skew our analyses of the ghetto, and whether we should actively strive to circumvent potential pitfalls of such thinking. I wonder if we will always limit our understanding by being monolingual and attempting to codify its existence in our own language. Or do we even care about understanding?

The ghetto as the static Other further indicates our complicit relation to, and responsibility for, its existence. Our tacit refusal to engage it (and the people who inhabit “it”) as a breathing, dynamic organism amounts to our negation of its worth. We are watching a long, gradual process of generational suicide—tantamount to observing, but doing nothing to help, a man in agony from stabbing himself in the stomach. He misses all vital organs so is not in immediate danger, but eventually, his body will no longer be able to cope with the effects of the pathological knife. We are eyewitnesses but make sure to watch from a safe distance—behind classroom doors, television reports, newspaper articles—because his life is not worth the sacrifice of the comfort maintained in remaining forever ignorant of pain such as his that exists, or by relation, our comfort in knowing that his pain does not affect our lives so long as we stare with a peripheral gaze. It is along this line of thought that our society views Hurricane Katrina as a natural disaster, not a man-made one.

The voices of these men, women, and children exist…they are rich, beautiful, repulsive, raw, vibrant, human. Only within the last century have Western ears opened to female, colored, and queer voices, and the West continues to struggle with persistent and honest self-reflection. America in particular would cease to exist should it be forced to scrutinize the mythical history of its exceptionalism. The reflex, therefore, is to resist…to repress and shelter away from historical memory because it is easier to forget. I am certainly not exempt from this fact, nor am I exempt from behavior criticized above. But the sheer load of every story erased and every tale untold should weigh heavily on the conscience of every modern bard…and though people are beginning to study and explore territory previously uncharted by dominant cultures, the voice of the outside observer—even in a well-meaning attempt to shed light on Other stories—still dominates the space. Our observations still constitute these new additions to historical memories. The very least we can do, collectively, is resist the tendency toward authorship: step back a bit and transcribe, rather than create, their stories.