A few Thursdays ago I sat at a table at a campus café making sandwiches with our university's YACHT (Youth Against Complacency and Homelessness Today) club. It was the week that "The Wiz", which premiered in 1978 as the remake of "The Wizard of Oz" capturing the African American experience, would be revamped live with an entirely new, but very well-known cast. The cast included stars like, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Ne-Yo, Elijah Kelly, Amber Riley, Uzo Aduba and Common. Being that The Wiz Live was a hot topic that week, a friend of mine made it clear that she’s never even heard of the original Wiz and asked, “Why’s everybody talking about that this week? I’ve never heard of it”. Not too much time went by before another student sitting across from us told her, “It’s like the Wizard of Oz...but ghetto.”
Although it only took me approximately a second and a half to respond, a slew of thoughts raced through my brain and threatened to escape my tight-lipped mouth before I was able to respond in a way that wouldn’t make the situation worse.
The first thing that crossed my mind after I realized what I had just heard had not been a misunderstanding, was the fact that I had never put much thought into why somebody would think of an all-black cast and immediately describe the entirety of the film, as ghetto. Since "The Wizard of Oz" was an all-white cast, and "The Wiz", an all-black cast, I instantly found this student's comment to be extremely offensive. Ghetto, a term that I learned in middle school to be a noun that represented the communities created in the different quarters Jews were forced to live in during the Holocaust, was being used as an adjective to describe an All-Star cast of Black American actors. Social, and economic pressure, can contribute to an area becoming a ghetto, however, a ghetto would be where a specific group of persons lives, especially if the area is made primarily of minority groups. This being said, yes, there are many places where black people are a minority, like our own Eastern University for example. This does not justify categorizing any black person, or groups of black persons, as "ghetto”. A major reason being that many, if not all of us, sat in one of 26 alphabetized squares on an elementary school carpet while reciting that adjectives are “describing words”.
Michael Jackson, scarecrow in "The Wiz", hit the stage at five and began living a life of fame almost immediately. With more than 785 awards in his lifetime, he’s well-known as one of the most famous people, that not just the United States, but that the world has ever seen. Diana Ross, Dorothy in the original "Wiz", was also extremely famous in her lifetime. With countless Best Actress awards in her life time and 70 hit singles, it’s really difficult to find the common ground in labeling the remake of "The Wizard of Oz", as something much less superior due to the fact that the actors are black instead of white.
The more I thought about it, the more I came to the realization that although I felt like this was an insult to black people everywhere, it’s not the girls fault that ghetto was the first term that came to her mind. Being that I attended a boarding school, which housed students form low income backgrounds, minorities in my high school were actually the majority. We knew what people thought of us, we just didn’t encounter it every day or as often as we would have in the real world. Being that the student who made this statement is white, I could have very well assumed, the same way that she assumed a group of black actors constituted a ghetto film, that growing up she had a fairly easy life with no troubles at all and got everything she asked her daddy for. So, to my friend who made this statement, I hope you come across this article at some point, and know that I definitely do not blame you for thinking the way you do or as fast as you did that night.
It’s my prayer that over time occurrences like this become fewer and we become more sensitive to the groups of people around us. Not just the majority living in fear of having to constantly be politically correct in order not to offend anybody, but that the minorities can open their eyes as well and see how the majority, people who are so often portrayed as being born with a silver spoon in their mouths, face hardships as well. From the outside looking in, maybe a group of black people do represent something ‘slumish’ to the majority, but can we really blame the people of today for ideas that have been ingrained in our history for hundreds of years? Slavery, racism and segregation were all a very real part of America's past.
Many make the argument that because slavery doesn’t exist here in the United States (anymore), and black-white segregation is a thing of the past, that racism is extinct as well. The student who said this, and I know for sure, is not racist! Not in the least bit, but because America's past is racist, as well as many of our great-great grandparents, and perhaps even some of their children, many ideologies, right or wrong, have been passed down from generation to generation. Perhaps it has become less apparent, but every so often, like that Thursday in the café, a little piece of our nation’s past creeps up and roars its ugly head, unaware and culturally numb to the country and race equality that we are working toward today.
When the original statement was made, I paused. I thought of the amazing original cast of "The Wiz," while anticipating the premier of the "The Wiz Live" and the talented cast that was to come and said respectfully, “The Wiz is Black. Not Ghetto”.
