It's Been a While.

And for that, I am sincerely sorry. Things have been ridiculously busy around here, what with being an RA, President of RHA, having a girlfriend, and planning for King Cougar.*

Yet I want to maintain this blog. On that note, I am about to copy/paste an opinion article I just wrote for Veritas, the CCU student newspaper. I know this is the cheap way out, but like they always say, "it's better to kills two birds with one stone than write an opinion article and not post it to your blog."

Deal.


What’s In a Name? (OR) The "Ghetto" Only in Name

I remember a phone conversation with one of my soon-to-be residents over the summer. I told him that I was the RA of the Ghetto for this year, and that I was really excited to get to know him. He responded by asking me a question. “Is the Ghetto, like, junkier than other stairwells?” After a moment’s pause, I responded in the negative and began informing him on the history of stairwell names – how they were chosen years ago by students who wished to express the zeitgeist in the stairwell. And while I don’t know for sure why the founders of the Ghetto decided to call it such, I would like to give an account of the current meaning of the term “Ghetto” as it pertains to CCU.

The history and scholarly definition of the word “ghetto” is not a glorious one. Princeton’s WordNet defines it as “1. Formerly the restricted quarter of many European cities in which Jews were required to live; ‘the Warsaw ghetto.’ 2. Any segregated mode of living or working that results from bias or stereotyping; ‘no escape from the ghetto of the typing pool.’ 3. A poor densely populated city district occupied by a minority ethnic group linked together by economic hardship and social restrictions.” Yet the word has become more of an adjective in today’s world; one might describe a trashy car or a shoddy production as “ghetto.”

Where does that leave the Ghetto Stairwell? Is this a passé name which should be thrown out with last semester’s class notes? To flee from this ugly definition, should we propose a name change for the stairwell? When faced with an undesirable reality, there are two paths one can take. The first is to flee from the tide. You distance yourself from the cause of your grief. You shed the old skin and start anew. You wash your hands and walk the other direction as quickly as possible. Yet I submit to you that the more noble reaction is to effect change within your circumstances. Rather than spurn the connotation of the word “ghetto,” we should strive to reverse the polarity of the term. We can make “ghetto” mean something different. We can redeem rather than be repulsed. The beauty of language is that it is always in a state of flux. It is alive and moving. Most importantly, it is created by man and can therefore be re-created by man.

So it is with the Ghetto Stairwell. We seek not to “be ghetto” as our culture defines the term, but instead tell the culture what “ghetto” now means. Our goal is to reinvent the word and bring light into a dark area of language. When the tax collectors come to John the Baptist and ask, “What shall we do,” John does not tell them to stop being tax collectors. He instructs them instead to only collect what they are required to. In other words, don’t flee from your blighted profession – redefine what it means to be a tax collector.

In I Corinthians, the Apostle Paul is telling off the religious folk of the Corinthian church for expecting their obedience in Christ to mean financial or material gain. The Corinthians obviously thought that a mark of Apostleship is wealth and power. To illustrate a true Apostle, Paul writes that “we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world.” In other translations, it is interpreted as “everybody’s garbage” and “the filth of humanity.” It is not a far stretch to say that Apostles ought to be the Ghetto of the world. Let it be so.



Thanks for reading,

-Daniel K



*The annual male beauty pageant. My friends and I will be hosting this year.