THIS ISN'T your childhood Monopoly game. The top hat, the shoe and the iron have been replaced by a pimp, a marijuana leaf and a crack rock. And the properties around the board include a liquor store, a gun shop, and a peep show. And remember those Chance cards that said, "Win second prize in a beauty contest. Collect 10 dollars"?Now, if you get lucky you might draw one that reads, "You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50." The game is called "Ghettopoly," and it's been a hit. But since Ghettopoly's conception, leaders of the black community have been publicly protesting its sale, deeming it racist. Last week, Yahoo.com responded by prohibiting online sale of the game as an "offensive" material. First Amendment issues aside, is the game offensive? Yes. But racist? No. This is one more example of what's become an all too common fallacy. The attack on Ghettopoly is symptomatic of a culture obsessed with arbitrary racial solidarity.
Presidential candidate Rev. Al Sharpton is largely responsible for introducing the game to public criticism, recently advocating a national boycott. His civil rights organization, the National Action Network, stated that black Americans deserved a public apology from Urban Outfitters for selling the game. Other black community leaders agree that it is racially offensive, asserting that the game implies that the entire black race is nothing more than drug dealers, alcoholics and pimps.
On what logic these allegations are based is unclear. The game does not parody a universal black "culture" (if such a thing can even be said to exist). Rather Ghettopoly targets lower class, urban communities, many of which happen to be dominated by black people. But protestors are mistakenly and dangerously associating a circumstantial characteristic with a defining one. The playing board seems to even go out of it way to include Asian, Irish, Latino and Jewish ethnicities among residents of the ghetto. Even supposing that every character of the board was black, this would not justify a condemnation of the game as racist. There is a huge distinction between saying that all residents of the "ghetto" are black and that all black people live in the "ghetto." The game explicitly refutes the first statement.And the second is not even implicit in the game, but an erroneous fabrication founded on an overemphasis of race. In attacking an assumption not inherent to the game, black leaders have really perpetuated it.
No one is going to mistake Al Sharpton for a crack-addicted pimp because his skin happens to be dark. The existence of Ghettopoly said nothing about him as an individual until he demanded that it did. The existence of this game does not condemn anyone to a degraded status because of their race. It is offensive to poor whites from South Bronx, not educated, middle-class blacks. This is the classic confusion of race and class that pervades America. The unwarranted association of "black" with "ghetto" does not illuminate racism, but perpetuates the stereotypes it seeks to condemn.
Still, some members of the black community insist on defining a transcendent, vertical solidarity among all people who are similar in skin tone. Not only is it irrational to link people together like this, but it is problematic. In universalizing the black American and in advocating skin color as the supreme contribution to identity, black community leaders have removed the agency of the individual. They are unnecessarily tying themselves to their weaker links.
The University is a community that exemplifies this misunderstanding. People were up in arms two years ago when Architecture school students hosted a "medallion party" which parodied "rapper culture." The incident was wrongly associated with a genuinely racist incident, when two fraternities hosted the "blackface party" last Halloween. The significant difference between these two events exemplifies the discrepancy between racially and culturally offensive. Race signifies an aesthetic characteristic, skin color, and nothing more. By painting their faces black, guests at the Halloween party explicitly insulted the entire black race. The "medallion party," like Ghettopoly, parodied a culture. But a categorical linkage of medallion-wearers and the black race was not necessarily implicit in the party's theme. Each well-off, suburban, educated black student who took offense gave foundation to this nonexistent association.
What I credit black community leaders with is their activism. Historically, black community leaders have had the awareness and the priorities to fight for social change, where other racial minorities have been passive. But in instances such as this, making race the central issue is illogical, detrimental and lazy. If you want to censor offensive material, have the lucidity to attack it on the proper grounds. Ghettopoly may be insulting and in poor taste, but for reasons independent of race. America has gotten past the scientifically racist of problem of "All black people are inferior."Now we need to work on simply "All black people are..." We can't get rid of the distinction of race, but we can remember that it's only skin deep.
(Kimberly Liu's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kliu@cavalierdaily.com.)
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