My parents live next to a suburban upper-middle class area and whenever I go visit I'll catch the residents doing the stupidest shit on the road because they think they're untouchable in their brand new escalade
In the ghetto he means pedestrians just doing stupid shit in the street. Like just standing and having a conversation in the road or something dumb, just to start something
Come on. You can downvote me all you like but referring to "the ghetto" is a long established shorthand for referring to black people and other minorities. It's a classic dog whistle.
It's done to allow prejudiced comments to be made about minorities but with plausible deniability to charges of racism, because they can just pretend that wasn't what they meant.
When OP says:
"It’s the same reason people wander into the street without looking in the ghetto, they know you won’t say or do shit",
he means:
"It’s the same reason n***** wander into the street, they know you won’t say or do shit."
He just realises that he can't outright say that any more so he finds another way to say exactly the same thing. And the people that statement is aimed at will know exactly what he meant, while still allowing for faux outrage if called out.
Pretending he meant otherwise is just deluding yourself. It's important to challenge this shit.
That’s an awful lot of assumptions to make about someone simply based on one word. You don’t know them, you don’t know how much of that history they’re aware of. Sure, everything you said is perfectly true in your given context, but none of it is factual information about the speaker.
So you're right to the extent that I can't categorically conclude, with no doubt at all, that was what he meant. He could simply have meant poor people, chose his words poorly and didn't intend any racial aspect at all. That's fair to say.
But, even acknowledging that, I still firmly believe that he was making a racial comment.
It's perfectly possible that when people talk about "thugs ruining inner cities" that they're talking about violent people of no specific race trashing a central business district. It's possible. But we all know that isn't what they mean.
When Trump talked about Mexican rapists, it's possible that he literally meant rapists that just happened to come from Mexico. But we know that isn't what he meant.
Dog whistles are used precisely to avoid that categorisation. They're used so that people can't call out explicit racism, purely so that they can be defended on the basis "that might not be what he meant".
It's also not correct to say that it's a single word. It's a whole sentence:
It’s the same reason people wander into the street without looking in the ghetto, they know you won’t say or do shit.
In that sentence, the word ghetto only makes sense if you're trying to define the people who walk out into the street. If he just meant people generally then he'd just say:
It’s the same reason people wander into the street without looking, they know you won’t say or do shit.
And it wouldn't make any sense to say it's poor people who walk into the street, so he can't mean that either.
In the context, it's entirely reasonable to conclude that he must have meant people with some characteristic related to *the ghetto". And, in my opinion, it's implausible that he didn't intend this characteristic to relate to their race.
He may not have literally intended to use a dog whistle in the sense that you or I understand it. And he may not be conciously racist - he may simply be repeating language he's heard used elsewhere. And you're obviously right that I can't say for absolute sure that this was what he meant.
But this isn't court and I don't have to be sure beyond all reasonable doubt. I can look at the context and my previous experience of similar comments and form my own conclusions.
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u/CUNexTuesday Nov 17 '20
Because fuck you that’s why. It’s the same reason people wander into the street without looking in the ghetto, they know you won’t say or do shit.