In The Ghetto...

...the first time I remember hearing the word ghetto was when I asked my mom what it meant after hearing Elvis Presley sing Mac Davis' In The Ghetto...uh, maybe sometime around 1975 for me. The song was originally titled The Vicious Circle and Elvis recorded it as In The Ghetto at American Sound Studio in Memphis in 1968 - the same year Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr, Neal Cassady, Yuri Gagarin, Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck died. Wow! Talk about a mouth-full! And the year before some of us saw Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix pass. WTF? Vietnam was a festering boil - Israel had won the Six Day War with G-d and Bob Dylan on their side, patriotiam had become the last refuge of the scoundrel, and Ivy League schools were prepping for the sneaky neo-cons!

Prefix: to place in front of, especially to add as a prefix - 'prefix a syllable to a word'. I preferred Websters because it is still a bit original and not so modern. So when did GHETTO become a syllable?

Most Anthropologists and Sociologists will tell you that one of the most common avenues used to destroy or conquer a nation, people, country, ethnic group, cultural entity, etc. was/is to subdue it's native language. "Subduing" a native tongue did not always mean completely doing away with it but often times more than others it included DE-SENSITIZING (there goes the prefix) original peoples uses of certain words initially and then indirectly deriding the entire language.

Not far from the gates of Graceland Elvis sang:

"People, don't you understand, the child needs a helping hand or he'll grow to be an angry young man some day. Take a look at you and me, are we too blind to see, do we simply turn our heads and look the other way? Well the world turns and a hungry little boy with a runny nose plays in the street as the cold wind blows In the ghetto."

Put ghetto before all of the following words and please explain to me what the meanings are: -food, -car, -soul, -house, -bootie, -hair, -shirt, -watch, -dog, -honey, -man, -gay (gay-ghetto), -school, -church, -medicine, -education ????????????????

I'll tell you what it means: an attempt by racist suburban pigs to subtly diminish an ethnic groups identity and self worth by further claiming that they are nothing without "whitey!" It means a place where Jews were pushed into well before Hitler that ended in the camps under the Nazis. It means a place in northern Africa where Jews were "quartered" in front of the ruling elites compounds to protect them from riotous crowds. It means a place where people end up living due to less than financial prosperity becasue there is minimal revenue remaining in the area - schools suck, medical care sucks, transportation sucks, grocery stores suck (have you ever seriously shopped a grocery store in an economically depressed neighborhood? The meat department is akin to what I imagine a meat "counter" looked like in 1870 famished Ireland! - seriously - neckbones, tripe, feet, etc) These are not so much cultural delicassies as much as they are FORCED dietary items. A Vicious Circle? What did Elvis say? Take a look at you and me, are we too blind to see?

Graceland grew from south Memphis - south Memphis did not grow from Graceland. Lisa Marie recorded a duet "with her dad" in August 07' of In The Ghetto to raise money for the Presley Charitable Foundation which caught a lot of shit from the "holier-than-thow" crowd because of it's depiction of toddler's with guns in the city. Toddlers with guns? Huh? Black teenage kids are killing each other in this city and they are toddlers in the eyes of g-d! Our eyes are not too blind to see, our souls are too dark to know. Do you have to know something to care about it? Or do we simply refuse to care?

As "white flight" began in our country (whites leaving the inner city for the suburbs) the FHA Mortgage Manual stated: "Recommended restrictions should include provision for: prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended …Schools should be appropriate to the needs of the new community and they should not be attended in large numbers by inharmonious racial groups." Nothing else needs to be said.

Use of the word ghetto is unacceptable! Unless we (white people) are describing our own souls...it is a white-ghetto-diaspora-of-the-soul.