The great moments of rock ‘n’ roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.
I would always talk with my friends in English and Spanglish, but it was more like slang. It was more like, ‘Yo, what’s up, dog?’ But in Spanish, I know what’s proper, and what’s ghetto. I know the difference.
You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.
There are so many bad influences out there. I don’t care if a kid is rich or poor, if he lives in a million-dollar house or the ghetto, he is going to find some sick things on the street. And if we don’t clean it up soon, we’re all going to pay the price.
You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.
They don’t have to tell me what life is like in a ghetto.
How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat?
It’s also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.
‘Ratchet’ has a lot of meanings. You can be a bad ratchet or a good ratchet. You can have fun, be ghetto, and get ratchet.
You see, when I was young, I loved playing football. But where I grew up in southern Nigeria, it was kind of like a ghetto. It was a tough place to be a kid. You had to work very hard to make a living there, and my family did not have the extra funds to buy a real ball.
We hope we are moving toward a world where sexual orientation is not an issue, because we hate the idea of a gay ghetto. I think that it’s a real shame that people become restricted by their sexuality or define their whole lives by their sexuality.
I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I’m trying to enlarge the spectrum.
I’m playing a very strong character, it’s the story of the woman Polish Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto. I’ve just begun my weapons training and the SAS type training that’s getting me fit.
If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.
The main reason I wanted to be successful was to get out of the ghetto. My parents helped direct my path.
The trouble is not that schools don’t work; they do. They’re excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain – and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.
Because I’m a young black man driving a really nice, expensive car, I sometimes get harassed when I’m rolling through a ghetto neighbourhood.
‘Chopper City in the Ghetto,’ real talk, it’s what changed Cash Money from a Bounce label to a Rap label.
I’m from Long Beach – not the best area in the world – and I had a lot of ghetto friends growing up.
To me, I’m the epitome of what a ghetto child is: I was raised by a single parent; I stayed in apartments my whole life; I don’t think I’ve ever cut the grass.
We want to make everybody mad enough to look at the ghetto right in their own state, not just to look at the middle-class and the rich areas.
I came from the heart of the ghetto – there ain’t no suburbia in me.
We had a very normal, sort of ghetto, urban upbringing. My father was a bus driver and my mother was a seamstress and a substitute schoolteacher, off and on. So, that all adds up to no money.
It’s important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I’m from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don’t live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I’m still seeing the same things that I lived.
In the ghetto we didn’t even know there was such a thing as a private jet.
Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be ‘somebody’ so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.
One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto.
My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.
You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.
Right after we recorded ‘Satanic Satanist’ and ‘American Ghetto’ here in Boston, we decided we’d grow our hair out. This is – was – like the Beatles thing. I wanted to see these pictures later in life.
One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who’s come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that’s called ‘street credibility.’
People come to L.A. and they expect to see a ghetto like the projects, but that’s not the way it’s set up. Inglewood, in particular, is the furthest thing from a ghetto. It’s a middle-class community, but it’s gotten a bad rap over the years… because of ‘Grand Canyon’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ and other films.
Most superhero shows are set in an alternative universe. ‘Black Lightning’ is literally in the hood. He’s going inside of the ghetto and trying to make a difference.
Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand-new high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.
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