Moral Indignation Over (Ghettopoly) Game Is Misplaced

Osceola News Gazette ^ | 10/31/2003 | Leonard Pitts

[ServesURight]

Moral indignation over game is misplaced

31 Oct 2003
Leonard Pitts Miami Herald

I guess I’m obligated to be offended by this new board game. After all, Al Sharpton says I should.

And not just Rev. Al, either. Many other people — including NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and radio host Tom Joyner — have pronounced themselves offended by the game. Not that I blame them.

It’s called Ghettopoly, a take-off on Parker Bros. venerable Monopoly. Except that this game isn’t about moving a car or a top hat around the board, buying properties and landing on Boardwalk after somebody has put up a hotel. In Ghettopoly, your token might be a crack rock, a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor or a basketball, and your goal is to build crack houses while pimping “hos” and getting carjacked. The game reportedly features an image of Martin Luther King scratching the front of his pants and proclaiming, “I have an itch.”

So no, you won’t find “Ghettopoly” under my Christmas tree. Nor does it break my heart that retailers have been pressured into removing it from their shelves or that Hasbro, which owns Parker Bros., last week filed suit against the game’s creator, David Chang of St. Marys, Pa.

For all that, though, I am not angry at Chang, who seems more misguided than malicious. To the contrary, it’s the campaign against him that gets my dander up — not because it’s wrong, but because it’s about 15 years late. I keep wondering where all this fury was when rappers like 50 Cent, Nelly, Ja Rule and Snoop Dogg first started pimping, drug-dealing and drive-by shooting all over the video channels. Where were the boycotters when these people and others were creating the template Chang drew from? Where was the moral indignation when black people were reducing black life to caricature?

Or is it just easier to raise rage against Chang because he is not black?

With a few isolated exceptions — activist C. Delores Tucker, Rev. Calvin Butts — blacks have been conspicuously silent as black music, once the joy and strength of black people, has detoured into an open sewer of so-called “hardcore rap.” The vast majority of that genre’s practitioners are nothing more and nothing less than modern-day Uncle Toms, selling out black dreams by peddling a cartoon of black life unencumbered by values. It is a cynical, knowing act, promulgated by young men and women who get rich by selling lies of authenticity to young people, white and black, who are looking for lessons in blackness. They are as much minstrels and peddlers of stereotype as Stepin Fetchit, Bert Williams or any black performer who ever smeared black goop on his face or shuffled onstage beneath a battered top hat.

The only difference — the only one — is that Bert Williams and Stepin Fetchit had no other choice.

My personal theory is that black people of my generation — I’m 46 — have resisted speaking forcefully against this because, like all baby boomers, we are deathly afraid of appearing less than hip. But as I recall, our parents never worried about that. They understood their role to be not hipness, but guidance.

I am of a generation that has largely failed that role, that turned “judgment” into a four-letter word. The fruit of that failure lies before us: an era of an historical young people who traffic in stereotypes that would not be out of place in a Ku Klux Klan meeting.

And I’m supposed to be angry at David Chang? I’m not. He’s just a good capitalist, just regurgitating what he has been taught in hopes of turning a buck. My anger is not for the student, but for his teachers. And not just my anger, but my sorrow, too.

I’m not losing sleep worrying about what David Chang thinks of black people. I’m more concerned with what black people think of themselves.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him at (888) 251-4407 or via e-mail at lpitts@herald.com.)

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[ServesURight]

Ghettopoly™ Board Game
Ages: 13 to Adult.2 to 7 Playas.
Price: $29.95 (plus shipping & handling charges)

Buying stolen properties, pimpin hoes, building crack houses and projects, paying protection fees and getting car jacked are some of the elements of the game. Not dope enough?...If you don't have the money that you owe to the loan shark you might just land yourself in da Emergency Room.

http://www.ghettopoly.com

[Lijahsbubbe]

I wonder if the game will have a 'free nite with Uzzo' card?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

ping.

[upchuck]

Bump to Mr. Pitts. He makes a lot of sense.

[Publius6961]

Or is it just easier to raise rage against Chang because he is not black?

Precisely.
And Chang could never in a million years cause the damage to blacks that they have created for themselves.

And I reject the notion that they are the arbiters of what I may or may not buy.
Or else what? they're gonna send some home boys to "get" me?

This African wannabe tribalism and macho BS can stop any time now.
I refuse to play.

[Paradox]

I love Pitts, he is my favorite liberal leaning columnist. He is dead right on this one!

[Devlin]

So the lesson of all this is that black people can cash in by marketing gross and insulting blaxploitation stereotypes of "real blackness", but... (see above). I should point out that the rap/hip hop culture has sunk its teeth firmly into nonblack culture. These days, young black men from protected, middle class backgrounds aren't the only ones playing sociopathic street hoods, (read "gangstas"). In a fascinating example of deliberate reverse empowerment, even middle and upper income white kids get to play teenage street punk. Ain't cultural evolution grand?

[mhking]

Black conservative ping

If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)

Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.

[WOSG]

"Ain't cultural evolution grand?"

Make that cultural DEvolution.

This isnt a black thing, this is a moral degeneration thing, and whites from Jerry Springer and Madonna on down are doing their part to "define deviancy down". The Gangstas wouldnt be "players" if they didnt have white Corporate 'hos' and pimps willing to peddle their smut.

Anything for the $$$.

It is true that there are elements in the black community that in a juvenile way revel in 'badness'.
Very sefldestructive.

[HHFi]

Excellent article, except for one thing: the reference to Burt Williams as an example of a backward, shuffling stereotype. Williams wore blackface and worked within the minstrel tradition, but he conducted himself with a great deal of dignity both on and off stage. He was regarded as the finest pantomime artist of his time by even such a jealous competitor as W.C. Fields, and his routine to the simultaneously funny and heartbreaking song "Nobody" was one of the greatest performances ever in vaudeville or on Broadway.

Williams was also keenly aware of and burdened by the racism he had to deal with, even as a highly-paid entertainer, and made it a point to stand up for himself and his race. Eddie Cantor (who worshiped Williams) wrote in one of his books about the time Williams entered a bar and asked for a beer. The racist bartender, figuring he'd humilate him, sneered that a beer was five dollars (this was back when $5 was a good day's wages). Without even looking up, Williams pulled out a huge roll of bills, peeled off a hundred, slapped it down on the bar and said, "I'll buy a round for the house."

[Warrior Nurse]

This African wannabe tribalism and macho BS can stop any time now.

It is not tribalism it is nihilism.