Mirror, mirror on the wall: Who's the most ghetto of all?
Most of us would nominate
Adam (Pacman) Jones, the Tennessee Titans cornerback (at least for the moment) who has become the poster child for the ugliness that occurred last weekend in Las Vegas during the NBA All-Star festivities. And not just because he re-wrote Webster's, offering us another definition for "rain" by showering a herd of strippers with $81,000 in cash at strip club, at 5 a.m. (was there a breakfast special?), where three people ended up shot. One remains paralyzed. That's tragic.
But because he wants the money back. Ghetto.
For the last few days, the Internet has been abuzz with tales of an underbelly of the otherwise successful weekend. The impossible traffic and bloated crowds. Some cited the well-publicized police statistics:
403 arrests over the four-day weekend, well above a "normal" weekend whatever that is in Vegas.
Others folks just flat-out told it, all-but labeling the weekend the All-Star Ghetto Fest. Folks who were there cited everything from poor tipping, shoplifting and stiffing cabbies, to the outrageous attire worn by many of the women. Our women! (I've never seen the word "hoochie" used so much without being attached to BET.)
This has already been a proud year for us. We beamed at the sight of
Tony Dungy and
Lovie Smith, two strong Christian brothers, leading their men into the Super Bowl. And
Barak Obama's presidential bid is stirring a quiet hope that ripples across our generations and circumstances.
Moreover, it must be said that the majority of people in Las Vegas were civil, law-abiding and polite. That includes the vast majority of black people who went there, partied 'till the break of dawn and returned home without a ruckus.
That said, lets really keep it real: We got issues. And until we address them, debate them, confront them and, hopefully, alter them, we'll continue to be our own deadliest enemy.
Jason Whitlock, my AOL colleague, sparked an intense digital debate with his
spit-dead-on column citing the element in our community were often afraid to critique. He called it the
"Black KKK." The analogy may have been over-the-top given the lynchings perpetrated by the White KKK. But he got our attention. Whitlock wrote: "Just like the White KKK of the 1940s and '50s, we fear them, keep our eyes lowered, shut our mouths and pray they don't bother us."
Truth is the most ghetto in the mirror is us. And its time we not only recognized it but stopped enabling, accepting and -- Lord help us -- even celebrating it.
The NBA All-Star weekend used to be the league's company picnic. Players, league officials and even the media shared the same hotel, rode the same buses, attended the same parties, and the arena was filled with more local fans than sponsors. It grew into the NBA's biggest event, the only occasion when Commissioner
David Stern could toast-and-dine 20,000 of his closest corporate pals and give them a chance to chest-bump with the league's elite.
But along the way, the game became the "it" event for black sports fans. Or black party fans. And the weekend took on a tone that made it unique in all of sports.
For years now, I've called it the Negro Super Bowl.
The term struck me during the 2003 All-star game in Atlanta in which I spent much of the weekend sitting in the lobby dumb-founded by the outfits that our women decided were appropriate to wear outside the darkness of their own rooms. Even worse, I spent much of the weekend lamenting the loud and rude behavior of too many people who looked like me.
Of course, not everyone looked and acted like rap video rejects. And I'm sure most of us actually left a decent tip. But the tone had changed. And I didn't like it.
Call me old-school. Call me bourgie. I don't care. Unless I was on assignment, Ive had absolutely no desire to attend an All-Star Game since ATL. Correction: I've actually wanted to go because my son and daughter are huge fans and Id love to see their faces light up at the sight of their favorite players gathered in one venue.
But Last Vegas? Not a chance. I had an inkling it was not going to be pretty.
For its part, the league got in and out of Sin City like saints. No player or league associate was fingered in any incident. So this is not an NBA problem. It's a Negro Bonehead Army problem. Thats what we can call the element that descended on Las Vegas.
How did we come to this place? Interestingly, another fellow journalist, Cora Daniels, has just come out with a book called
Ghetto Nation in which she laments that "ghetto no longer refers to where you live, but to how you live. It illustrates a mindset that embraces simply the worst. It is as if the bar for what we think is acceptable or appropriate is so low that we can't even find it anymore."
She's troubled that the shootings are being discussed in the same breath as the general unruly crowds and tacky incidents. "We will never know if one black face was guilty of such ghetto behavior, 100 black faces, or no black faces at all," she told me Sunday night. "The reality is it doesn't matter because the impression is that when black folks congregate on a city it will be raped and pillaged. And by now the impression has been engraved in too many brains. So that is where the disappointment sets in: that we continuously destroy ourselves."
We both agree on the solution: Stop ignoring -- and fearing -- our ugly truths and confront them by expecting more of ourselves. Dig that bar out of the ground and lift it higher, just as it was raised for us by a generation for whom the bar was snatched away.
