First, find some third-generation immigrants.
Add some racism and confused cultural identity,
Mix – to create poverty.
Now, find narrow minds and an unwillingness to change,
Add bad parenting,
Allow to simmer.
In teenage males stir in low educational achievements,
A macho street ethos,
And a refusal to think for oneself.
Use plenty of blame culture (it’s everyone else’s fault),
Bring to the boil.
Now, in a separate container,
Mix bright women, aspirations, a willingness to adapt:
Throw in employment, hard work, morality -
Allow to ferment.
Place beside your boiling mixture;
Add to that a plentiful helping of drugs, general thievery and joy-riding,
Beat violently with extreme religion,
Touch feebly with religious and community leaders,
Leave well alone.
Finally, get some inadequates,
Watch the creation of an identity through destruction,
Apply to local shops, churches and pubs -
Let the decent evaporate away.
Wash hands of all responsibility,
Serve with large helpings of blindness and self-pity.
November 2001
This might seem like quite a cruel poem, but is based on a little personal observation (the area where I live went through a very bad patch and was heading downhill).
First-generation immigrants are hard-working and have fixed cultural and religious values, the second-generation question their parents’ cultural and religious values but still work reasonably hard, whilst a large proportion of the third generation don’t have their grandparents’ cultural or religious values or work ethic. This third generation doesn’t belong completely to their birth culture or to the host culture (due to covert racism) and find themselves aspiring to materialism but barred from attaining it.
Their parents – the second-generation – don’t have cultural or religious certainties and without that framework aren’t especially good parents. For teenage males (who aren’t brilliant at thinking for themselves anyway) from the third-generation this leads to lack of direction and identity when they most need it and a resulting emphasis on materialism and machismo.
Teenage women however are much more life-smart – they have high aspirations, work hard, have higher morality (perhaps through greater social coercion or perhaps because women are intrinsically more spiritual) and find it comparatively easy to get jobs. Their success compared to the failure of teenage males doesn’t help the self-worth of those males.
Now add in criminality, a dash of extremist religion, and community and religious leaders who are completely out of touch.
Finally find some losers who want to look good in front of their mates and who go around causing destruction.
The decent people slowly drift away and bingo! A ghetto is created.
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Comment by Ladaesha ;
i find this ” poem ” very offensive to the african american race it’s directed to , you sound like a lowclass idiot who doesn’t know what there talking about . I myself am a black women who grew up in one of those neighborhoods , and I am very successful . You are stereotypeing black people . Who are you to say this ? i can be an asshole as well . but i have way more class .
**** Really? You think this is addressed at African Americans? Not where I live, it’s a different racial group entirely. And you think all third generation immigrants are like that? No way! But there’s a pattern among a substantial minority if you look, and I’m pointing out that pattern. It might be offensive to you but the pattern’s there. The community I live in experienced these problems for a couple of years until a lot of effort was made to address them and they faded away ********
Posted on: September 25th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
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Comment by N/A
I really do not think this is directed to black people, and if it was the writer has little knowledge on the subject matter. Maybe the writer saw a TV special and has declared himself an expert. Black, Brown, White, Yellow, whatever mix in between; we all have groups that live in poverty. They are just named differently, ie: ghetto, bario, trailer park. So, no one cultural race can ever be better than another, because we all have our best and our worst.
Posted on: November 6th, 2009 at 2:23 am
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Comment by admin
Nice comment. Seriously.
Like I’ve said, this is actually what happened in the area where I live, and for ten years I lived in the poor bit.
Posted on: November 6th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
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Comment by N/A
I understand, I’ve been there myself, I’ve seen it and experienced it. I was raised in it, but did not allow it to define me.
(editted)
Posted on: November 7th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
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Comment by N/A
That is some B.S i cant beleive they posted that …. . I am black i live in the so called “ghetto” all that stuff goes on and most of us still make it out to do good things with our lives….so a little advice for whoever wrote that dont let the ghetto-ness fool you….being raised in the ghetto is better than being raised in a suburban neighborhood having everything handed to you…here we dont have that and it pushes us harder to get out look at some of these rich whites people loosing everything going to jail all types of stuff so they aint no better in my eyes…same things goes on in the so called “Ghetto” but aint nobody talking about what goes on in the suburbs….think about that
Posted on: April 1st, 2010 at 4:11 pm
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Comment by admin
Ummm – this wasn’t aimed at black people. Believe it or not you can have ghettoes of all sorts of different races. Any group of immigrants, for example. Where I live it’s people from the Indian subcontinent, and yes, I lived a few hundred yards from the core and it’s not BS, the first generation had spiritual values, the second has semi-spiritual values, and a huge part of the third generation (of males) has lost the plot completely with joyriding, drugs and general yobbery. Some of them I knew from little children. The third-generation females, on the other hand, have by and large not lost the plot and are out there getting jobs (or bringing up children).
We can debate why this has happened – Westernisation, rigid patriarchal institutions crumbling, male loss of identity, male spiritual weakness, the long time it takes males to mature as opposed to females, the more focussed expectations on women (get married by age 22 and have kids) – but it’s happening.
Posted on: April 3rd, 2010 at 1:39 pm