JUST ANOTHER BLACK FACE

I wonder is it that where ever I go do people first just see just another black face?  When just a group of my girlfriends go out to just enjoy a nice evening or when I take my boys out to have fun.  If my girlfriends and I might go out for a quick lunch, might go see the latest play, hop to a mall to see if there are a pair of spicy pair of heels that will set of that outfit; Do I notice that at some of these establishments I seem to get that eye, that look, that I have to help you but I really don’t want to.  Sometimes I do but I really don’t look at these incidents as they are looking at just another black face.  I look at them as you are just another ignorant person.  People of all kinds have had some bad experience with someone.  Race and gender is just a way of explaining the unexplainable.  “All black people are ghetto”.  I heard that come from a young man that could not have been no older than my fourteen year old son.  I was dumbfounded.  I grew up in what some people would call the ghetto.  I grew up on the eastside of Detroit.  Now that I am older and hear how most people view this side of the city; I never felt like I was in the ghetto.  My grandmother always told us “you don’t have to become a product of your environment.  If you see it as ghetto it will be ghetto”.  I had never viewed where I stayed as ghetto.  My grandmother bought a house and made it her home for her 13 children and 16 grandchildren (not all at one time, we are all different ages of course).  The reason that I am saying this is because I recently read the article written by AOL Black voices Columnist Roy S. Johnson titled Time to look in our Ghettoized Mirror.  It kind of put me in a awe in how alot of people look at African Americans.  This article was about the behavoir of the all-star weekend in Las Vegas.  He also shared with us about Cora Daniels the author of the book GHETTO NATION.  His statement ” which she laments that ghetto no longer refers to where you live, but how you live”.  I have not yet read this book but hopfully I can get a copy I am looking forward to reading this book.  Because in my mind at the age of 33 I thought this was common knowlegde.  I would say then that having knowlegde is not all that common.  Maybe next time that I can comment I would have read the book and can give you my opinion.  Until then I am not just another black face.