It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation by M.K. Asante Jr Read Free Book Online

actually, more importantly, why I am who I am.
    See, people who live in me know me on an intimate and visceral level, while people who live elsewhere probably know what I look like. However, most of these folks, residents and nonresidents alike, don’t understand who I really am.
    Is it important that they know who you really are?
    Is it important? It’s essential. Imperative. Especially for the post-hip-hop generation. They are going to be the ones whose decisions willaffect me the most. They’ve been fed a hyperrealistic, inadequate portrait of who I am and if not dealt with it will cause confusion and vital opportunities will be lost. Basically, they need to understand me in order to fully understand themselves.
    All right then, so, who are you? Who is the African-American ghetto?
    I’m a place where people are and have historically been forced to live.
    Which people?
    All types of people: brilliant, courageous, beautiful, crazy, funny, talented, strong, injured, soulful. All types. Geeks. Shoemakers. Scholars. Comedians. Athletes. Scientists. Lovers. The whole spectrum.
    The common denominator is that they’re economically poor and African-American.
    I’m curious about your name, “Ghetto.” What does it mean? Where does it come from?
    Linguists trace it back to the Italian words
“getto”
(to cast off) and
“borghetto”
(small neighborhood), the Venetian slang “gheto,” the Griko
“ghetonia”
(neighborhood), and the Hebrew word
“get”
(bill of divorce).
    The first time my name was written was when English traveler and writer Thomas Coryat, on a foot journey through Europe, described “the place where the whole fraternity of the Jews dwelleth together, which is called the Ghetto.”
    And what year was that?
    1611.
    Early in its usage it meant a walled-off and gated section in cities where Jews were confined. The word was mostly used in Italy, near port cities like Venice where a lot of Jews lived and worked. Jews wereplaced under strict regulations, forced to live together, and put on curfews that prevented them from being out at certain times. As if that wasn’t enough, sumptuary laws forced Jews to wear special starshaped yellow badges and yellow berets, identifying themselves as Jews and opening themselves up to taunts and attacks by Christians who were the majority.
    Damn. Did other writers back in the day write about your name?
    Yeah, lots. In 1879, British writer Dean Farrar writes about the ghetto in
Life of St. Paul
. Edward Dowden, a nineteenth-century literary critic, makes many references to ghettos in his analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley. British author Israel Zangwill wrote the books
Children of the Ghetto
and
Dreamers of the Ghetto
, both biographical studies. In 1908, Jack London in
Martin Eden
explains that his characters “plunged off right into the heart of the working-class ghetto.” Despite its usage by these writers, it wasn’t widely discussed or popular.
    When did it become widely known?
    The word blew up in the mid-1930s when the Nazis took power and set up ghettos that, just like in previous times, confined Jews into cramped, tightly packed areas of the inner cities of Eastern Europe. However, unlike previous ghettos in Europe, these ghettos were impoverished, overcrowded, and disease-plagued areas enclosed by stone or brick walls, wooden fences, and barbed wire. And, if Jews tried to leave, the penalty was death.
    So it was death either way?
    Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official, came up with what he called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” a program of systematic genocide that attempted to eradicate the entire Jewish population in Europe. In preparation, Eichmann began to move all Jewsinto ghettos. The Nazis, between 1939 and 1945, set up more than three hundred Jewish ghettos in the Soviet Union, the Baltic states, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. During the Holocaust, nearly all the Jews in the ghettos were killed—so yes, death either