Use of "Ghetto" as Negative Descriptor Is Not Appropriate
By Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez
Business Manager

Growing up, I was never really forbidden from cursing. I cannot recall ever being censured for my language, except once. I am not sure when "ghetto" first became popular slang, but I will never forget the first time I said it in front of my mother. I was in seventh grade, describing my day at school, and I labeled someone's actions "ghetto." My mother, who can be quite intimidating when she is annoyed, stopped me immediately and asked me what I meant by ghetto. While I wracked my brain for an answer, she proceeded to ask, "Where do you think we live?" My mother proceeded to explain, calmly and eloquently, the implications of calling something "ghetto." I never used the word again.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines ghetto as: a quarter of a city in which members of a minority groups live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure. It is commonly understood as a poor neighborhood, largely inhabited by members of ethnic minorities. While the word does have its origins in the Jewish ghettoes in Eastern Europe, even then, it was meant to describe an area essentially quarantined off from the mainstream.

In recent years, people, particularly young people, have used the word ghetto as an adjective (and occasionally an adverb) to describe the actions or appearances of other people, events, places, things, or even, sadly, themselves. For example, if someone steals cups from the dining hall, his or her friends might label that action ghetto. A hastily written, mostly illegible sign might be called ghetto. People are also quick to call yelling at someone in a public place ghetto, shoplifting from a department store ghetto, and playing music loudly ghetto. The idea is that these are things that occur in ghettoes or that people who live in ghettoes do.

The problem with using ghetto to describe these incidents is two-fold: first, it is a stereotype that makes associations between people who live in ghettoes and things labeled ghetto; second, it sets up a false dichotomy between the manners of people in different socioeconomic classes.

When an individual describes an action as ghetto, he or she is attributing that action to something common in a particular socioeconomic group. Ghetto is pejorative and is always applied to an action that is immoral, trashy, lazy, uncivilized, or otherwise negative. This creates an association between ghettoes (and the people who live in them) and such behavior.

In Huckleberry Finn, Huck does something stupid and gets angry with himself. He says aloud, "I'm such a nigger!" In saying that, he makes an association between nigger and stupid, and, considering that he uses nigger to describe Black people, Huck makes an association between Black people and stupidity. Similarly, when people describe undesirable traits and acts as ghetto, they make associations between ghetto and undesirable. This specifically applies to people living in ghettoes, since a place cannot commit acts.

Using ghetto as a general label for anything that is negative creates a false dichotomy between the values of people in ghettoes and people who are not. For example, calling shoplifting ghetto implies that only people living in ghettoes shoplift, which is obviously untrue. Even things as simple as eating something messy with one's hands is called ghetto, as if messy eating is indicative of one's socioeconomic status. The label stereotypes an entire group of people; it depicts ghetto as anything deplorable or laugh-worthy, and everything that is positive as deserving of its own specific word.

In the past, it was common to hear people say that someone "got Jewed"-that is, he or she was cheated-associating Jews with greed and ripping people off. Just as stereotyping religious groups is offensive, so are stereotypes about socioeconomic groups. Every word has meaning, and everything we say has an impact. We have to examine the implications of the words we say before incorporating the latest slang into our vocabularies.