Racialism and the Media. Venise T. Berry
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by her stylist as flaunting a classy-hood style (Hope, 2015). When she is released from prison Cookie is wearing big hoop earrings, a white fur jacket, and a tight-fitting leopard print dress from the 1980s (Jones, 2015). Unfortunately, her wardrobe doesn’t change much once she is back in the real world.
In one instance she might wear an Alexander McQueen dress with a Balenciaga clutch. In another moment she might wear a rhinestone tiger-striped dress with a long slit up the side. She uses a big Chanel gold pendant, Cavalli necklaces, and Gucci python bags to accessorize her leopard jumpsuits. (Wright, 2018, pp. 93–94)
Wright adds that Cookie’s character is constantly slipping between hustler and music mogul. Dr. Boyce Watkins called the show “Ghettofied Coonery” on ←28 | 29→CNN in a discussion with Don Lemon (Emery & Bennett, 2015). Watkins said, “A lot of black actors and actresses are tired of being put in the entertainment ghetto. The entertainment ghetto is basically the place where you have roles … specifically designed for black people, where black actors are kind of locked into” (Emery & Bennett, 2015).
Niecy Nash has solidified her spot in Claws, a ghettofabulous dramedy on TNT. Nash plays Desna, the owner of a nail salon who launders money for the mafia, commits and covers up murders, but takes care of her crew who are known for their unique, over-the-top manicures. Nash wears signature tight fitting, low-cut jumpsuits, emphasizing her big breasts, small waist, and large behind (Carter, 2017). Her character also enjoys hood-style bling with rings on every finger, big silver chain belts, gold bangles, huge dangling earrings and necklaces, and, of course, long dazzling fingernails (Cutler, 2017). In a 2018 NPR interview, Nash said at five-years-old she told her grandmother that she wanted to be, “Black, fabulous and on TV” (Sanders & Sastry, 2018). She has definitely accomplished that.
Ghettofabulous in Urban Fiction
Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan was released in 1992 and it became a huge success. The book sold four million copies, it was followed by a sequel and became a hit movie. Because of the success of Waiting to Exhale the doors to publishing opened wide for African American women’s fiction. Fast forward twenty years later, African American Women’s fiction has, for the most part, been replaced at large publishing companies by urban/street fiction which is flying off the shelves.
This new focus on negative black stereotypes of male thugs and female hoochies has made urban/street fiction the perfect genre to push into the mainstream. James Fugate the owner of Eso Wan Books in Los Angeles expressed his concerned, “The ghetto lit being written today is mostly ‘mindless garbage about murder, killing, thuggery. When you read this ghetto lit nothing happens to your mind. And that is the problem” (Daniels, 2007, p. 65).
Research in this area suggests that remedial learners are more engaged with urban fiction. Specifically, the stereotypes, sexual themes, and violence serves to lure them in despite poor reading achievement (DeBlaze, 2003; Mahiri, 2004; Morris, Hughes-Hassell, Agosto, & Cottman, 2006; Rampey, Dion, & Donahue, 2009; Stovall, 2005; Townsend, Thomas, Neilands, & Jackson, 2010). Gibson (2016) produced a study on African American girls reading urban fiction and found that outside of class urban fiction was very popular. She suggested that street lit could be used as a bridge to interest African American girls in other reading genres.
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In 2005, Stovall reported that a variety of readers from a broad range of class backgrounds were reading urban fiction. This report worried Pollard (2015) who argued that the depiction of drug culture, poverty, criminal violence, and hypersexuality in the genre was creating an unrealistic trope of authenticity fueled by market driven expectations. However, a student experiment, by Bean and Moni (2003) used urban fiction to motivate critical discourse concerning racial images and messages. They offered the storylines as a way to challenge negative representations and cultural stereotypes, along with questioning beliefs about identity. Gibson (2016) taking that same approach discovered that African American girls were able to demonstrate some of the critical literacy skills necessary to challenge such stereotypes and problematic representations in urban/street fiction.
When problematic images and messages are promoted and accepted through the publishing industry, researchers, librarians, and teachers racialism is at work. There is no denying that The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) by Sista Souljah was the catalyst for popularizing urban fiction. And the problem, as Fugate expressed earlier, was that the main character, Winter, had absolutely no growth in the story. She was stupid at the beginning of the book and stupid at the end.
Book stores today are filled with ghettofabulous stories about black inner-city life that promotes ignorance and glorifies violence. Some of the obvious titles include: Thugs and the Women Who Love Them (Clark, 2002), Crackhead and Crackhead II (Lennox, 2012a, b), Murderville (Coleman, 2012), Gangsta (K’wan, 2014), The Dopeman’s Wife (Coleman, 2014), and Nasty Girls (Gray, 2007).
Munshi (2015) wrote about an urban fiction couple Ashley and Jarvis Coleman. Not only do they write urban/street fiction, but they met in a ghettofabulous way. According to the article in Financial Times, Jarvis was sixteen-years-old, running from the police when he threw nine ounces of cocaine into 15-year-old Ashley’s back yard. Ashley stashed the drugs for him and they have been together ever since. The couple started out reading urban fiction books together, then one day they decided to write one, Today, they each write approximately 5,000 words daily finishing a book in approximately three weeks. This is one of the many criticisms concerning urban/street fiction, the lack of quality. A book written in three weeks usually reads like it was written in three weeks.
Ghettofabulous in News
The unique difference when it comes to thinking about ghettofabulous in the news is that the news is real. In his song “Ghetto Fabulous,” Dr. Dre says no matter how much money you make you have to stay true to the game. Halnon (2011) argues ←30 | 31→that the way to stay true is to situate oneself in materialistic culture while at the same time maintaining authenticity which means keeping a connection to the street.
On the consumer side this means that media representations of the black ghetto require certain realities to support the popular image such as real thugs, real gangs, real gangbanging, real drug dealing, and the real selling of women … the authentic value of black ghetto cool is contingent upon the harsh material realities of everyday African American inner-city life. (p. 4)
The crossover between pop culture images of the ghetto and the real inner city are very important. Loury (1998) wrote that the legacy of slavery lingers in our cities’ ghettos. He believes there is problem with the color line when it comes to the lower class.
These black ghetto dwellers are a people apart, susceptible to stereotyping, stigmatized for their cultural styles, isolated socially, experiencing an internalized sense of helplessness and despair, with limited access to communal networks of mutual assistance. Their purported criminality, sexual profligacy, and intellectual inadequacy are the frequent objects of public derision. In a word, they suffer a pariah status. It should not require enormous powers of perception to see how this degradation relates to the shameful history of black-white race relations in this country. (Loury, 1998)
We see this pariah status in the news often. For example, one news headline reads, “In Chicago, One Weekend, 66 shooting victims and Zero Arrests” (Oppel & Harmon, 2018). The article reports that the shootings were concentrated on the west and south sides of the city which are areas known for high crime and high levels of gang activity. Another headline, “Baltimore is the Nation’s Most Dangerous City” was in USA Today. It cites city officials as saying that gangs and drug activity are responsible for the high crime numbers (Madhani, 2018). A third headline from FiveThirtyEight speaks for itself, “Black Americans are Killed at 12 Times the Rate of People in Other Developed Countries” (Silver, 2015).
In his memoir, rapper and actor Ice T said crime is about making easy money, “There is something sexy about crime because it takes a lot of courage to fuck the system.”
On mass media screens today, whether television or movies, mainstream work is usually portrayed as irrelevant, money is god, and the outlaw guy who breaks the rules prevails. Contrary to the notion that black males are lured by the streets, mass media in patriarchal culture has already