Word: ghettoes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Lane took over the Chicago Housing Authority in 1988, the ghetto projects he oversaw were rightly considered the nation's worst. The police estimated that violent gangs controlled 120 of the CHA'S 167 high-rises. "People were sleeping in bathtubs to avoid gunfire," Lane says, "and until that changed, you could forget the rest." Within weeks, Lane instituted Operation Clean Sweep, which continues to this day. Backed by the police, CHA officials examine apartments looking for places in need of repair and for "unregistered guests." If "by chance we uncover weapons or drugs," Lane says with a smile...
...politicians fear that the drug gangs will simply move to what Lane calls "normal" neighborhoods if the projects are swept "clean." "But that would be great," he insists. "Nationally, we'll never get a handle on violent crime until 'normal' folks feel the fear that's felt in the ghetto. Only then will they scream for the kind of law enforcement, including things like house-by-house searches, that gives content to all the law-and-order rhetoric. Ross may have gone too far, but he's on the right track." Which means Perot might consider saying what he says...
...little secret of the recording industry is that hip-hop music is a source of enormous profits. For all the claims that revolutionary rap speaks for oppressed inner-city youth, its main consumers are affluent white suburban teenagers seeking to cloak their adolescent rebellion in a veneer of ghetto toughness. Some formerly impecunious ghetto youths have turned into millionaires by becoming rap artists. Not for nothing does Ice-T boast on his recent release Original Gangster that "William Morris is my agency. I'll never go broke, got property...
...deftly slices life's jugular. Since his 1987 debut album, Rhyme Pays, Marrow -- who goes by his high school nickname of Ice-T -- has set off critics who accuse him of glorifying crime, homophobia, sexism and violence. His profanity-laced descriptions of gang life in a Los Angeles ghetto fostered a genre of hard-core black music known as "gangster rap." Tipper Gore of the Parents' Music Resource Center singled out Ice-T for the "vileness of his message...
Shows like Julia and I Spy (which teamed Bill Cosby with Robert Culp) succeeded by spotlighting black people who were fully assimilable -- the sort of blacks who, as one critic notes, "could move into your neighborhood and not disturb you at all." Ghetto comedies of the '70s like Good Times did a better job of reflecting black life, but they were betrayed by buffoonery (Jimmie Walker's strutting J.J.). Roots, of course, brought the black experience to a wider audience than any other show before or since, but its popularity, the documentary notes, came only by making slavery acceptable...