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education will allow them to escape the imposition of racist stereotypes. Often in predominantly white educational settings, black males put on their ghetto minstrel show as a way of protecting themselves from a white racialized rage. They want to appear harmless, not a threat, and to do so they have to entertain unenlightened folks by letting them know “I don’t think I’m equal to you. I know my place. Even though I am educated I know you think I am still an animal at heart.”
     
    Writer Kheven Lee LaGrone believes that middle-class “Black teens are stuck between the plantation and the ghetto.” In the article “The 90s Minstrels,” he asks,
    Do they feel they are treated like minstrels, the black American “other,” or as a “nigger/nigga” defined by white suburbia? This is important, since for many black suburban youth, gangsta rap may represent their only connection to the inner city and to what they consider “true” blackness
.
     
    The real Blackness hooks and LaGrone write about, and that my brother spent his life chasing, isn’t real at all. It’s reel: from the ignorant, womanizing, hypermasculine thug to the oversexed, loud, quick-to-get-an-attitude-over-nothing bitch. It’s all reel.
    In the case of my brother, who is a few years north of thirty, I hold on to grains of hope that someday he might turn things around, redefine himself and climb out of the prefabricated box he’s in. For some though, it’s too late.
    The late Russell Tyrone Jones—also known as Joe Bananas, Dirt McGirt, Dirt Dog, Ason Unique, Big Baby Jesus, Osirus, and most commonly Ol’ Dirty Bastard—died frontin’. Much like my brother, ODB spent his adult life dancing between jail, welfare, and stints with rap success. And also like my brother, ODB vehemently denied his middle-class upbringing, and instead promoted a poverty-stricken, dangerous one (as if being Black wasn’t enough). In “Caught Up,” he raps:
    I’m a ghetto nigga dog so I get it how I live
    Got money, lock ’em off, fuckers still I got drama
    Got two strike dog and five baby mamas
.
     
    “I was furious,” said William Jones, ODB’s father. “You know, that story about him being raised in the Fort Greene [Brooklyn] projects on welfare until he was a child of thirteen was a total lie,” he added. When Jones talked to his wife about their son’s bogus claims of ghettoship, her response was simple: “He did it for publicity.” Of course he did. ODB understood that boasting racist and classist stereotypes about Blacks would reaffirm them in the minds of a largely white consumer market. This would explain the correlation between ODB’s run-ins with the law and simultaneous spikes in record sales.
    ODB’s story reminds us that most artists feel that in order to “make it,” they need to portray a stereotypical image that is marketable to white America. As a result, artists like ODB downplay their middleclass origins and artists who are from the ghetto avoid portraying and calling out the savage injustices that created their condition. When
Time
magazine covered gangsta rapper Ice-T’s upbringing, they noted that “Although he lived in Windsor Hill, a middle-class section of L.A., he claims he began hanging with a rough crowd. He plays up these tough-guy roots to legitimize his hard raps.”
    It is this type of rhetoric and these decisions by culture makers that has caused “Black” to become synonymous with the “reel ghetto.” It is like a person who is seeking to become something that he is not because he is so worried that he will not be accepted by the masses as real. But real is as real believes and lives. You can find it anywhere. Julie Dash, the filmmaker responsible for such works as
Daughters of the Dust
and
The Rosa Parks Story
, reminds me that, “Our lives, our history, our present reality is no more limited to ‘ghetto’ stories than Italian Americans are to the Mafia, or Jewish Americans are to the Holocaust.”
    In an