Straddling the line.

• Author: Samuel, Leah
• Position: Ghettonation: A Journey into the Land of Bling and the Home of the Shameless - Book review

Ghettonation: A Journey into the Land of Bling and the Home of the Shameless

By Cora Daniels

Doubleday. 214 pages. $23.95.

"Girl," Tarshel of I would begin, once the phone was picked up. I just saw the Ghetto Moment of the Day!" And the tale would invariably be about a black, often young, person engaged in some socially or professionally inappropriate or embarrassing act.

A woman at a shoe store yells into her cell phone, "She pregnant again? By who?" Tarshel wimessed that one.

I overhear a young man standing in line at a store yelling into his cell phone, "That nigger in jail again? I just bailed his ass out!"

A man at a gas station tells another after a date, "Man, I'm about to take this bitch home." Tarshel hears that one.

Tarshel is a librarian and a journalism instructor at a two-year college with a mostly black student population. I am a reporter who has covered poor neighborhoods and communities of color for eighteen years. And to arrive at these careers, we both had emerged from black childhoods in which limited educational, social, and economic opportunities were the norm.

Now comes Cora Daniels's Ghettonation , which grew out of her own experiences, observations, and analyses. Like Tarshel and me, Daniels was born in the waning years of the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Daniels looks at the everyday, practical matter of living in a racist culture and how difficult it is to resist internalizing that racism.

Ghettonation is as plainspoken as its title, identifying and addressing the practices and practitioners of "ghetto," defined by Daniels as "actions that seem to go against basic home training and common sense." She points out such actions in the streets and in office suites, from New York to Hollywood and everywhere in between.

She even starts us off with a history lesson on the word "ghetto," from Italy to Jewish neighborhoods in Europe to the blighted inner cities of the U.S. From there, Daniels then brings us to the current understanding of ghetto, as a noun and primarily, for the purposes of the book, an adjective.

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Daniels includes in her definition of ghetto the "common misusage" of the term to mean: "authentic, black, keepin' it real." She suggests that this way of thinking, by those inside and outside America's ghettos, assumes that to be black means to live and think in only one way--driven by poverty and the unwillingness to speak proper English, among other...