Karen Bettez Halnon, Ph.D.

Contact Karen Halnon, author of this research and the book Poor Chic: Poverty Fads, Fashions, and Media in Popular Consumer Culture(forthcoming).

Web site developed by web master, Daryl Fenstad, Senior at Penn State Abington, Spring 2008

E-mail your “Poor Chic” photos to Dr. Halnon and she may use them on this web site or in her upcoming book!

Updated last: June 25th, 2008

All images and photos displayed on this web site are in the public domain, are royalty free, or were donated by students

“Black Ghetto” Chic

Black Ghetto Chic refers to an array of fads, fashions, and media in popular consumer culture that stylize Black urban poverty as “cool,” and that offer “authenticity” through pop cultural imaginings of the racialized ghetto and the ghettoized.

Black Ghetto Chic includes many symbols, images, and caricatures, such as:

• Baggy pants (no belts allowed in prison)
• Timberland boots without laces (no laces allowed in prison either)
• Gangstaz and Pimps (e.g., 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg)
• “Bootylicious Shawtyz” (Listen, for example, to the songs “Crank Dat,” “Low,” and “Cyclone”).
• Nike and Hilfiger anything
• White T-shirts
• Doo-rags
• Hoodies
• Designer sweatsuits
• Grillz
• “Bling-Bling”
• Izzle-speak
• Pimped rides
• Ghetto Fab
• “Wiggers” and “Wannabees” (as in Malibu’s Most Wanted).

In ghetto reality, many young Black males find their very integrity, self-esteem, and self-identity intricately embedded in what sociologist Elijah Anderson calls the “code of the street.” Tragedy and necessity combine when the price of gaining safety, respect, and masculine identity, in a situation of extreme social and economic alienation, is to radically and visibly define one’s self against anything that is conventional. To do so ultimately means to gamble with one’s future and one’s life, and to frequently resign oneself to a fatalistic understanding of an inevitably short life.

It might go without saying that the code of the street, at least from the perspective of many who must live with it--is not a form of recreation, a fad, or a fashion, but a form of survival. However, the harsh material realities of violence, illegal drug-dealing, and death--or the predictable consequences of persistent and intense ghettoization--have been transformed into a playful code of consumption.

While acknowledging the value of minority cultural capital (e.g. selling “ghetto” excess as a means of “getting over”), Halnon argues that “Black Ghetto Chic” constitutes new walls of racism, or segregation in the mainstream. She interrogates, as does Cornel West, how did we get from “Let Freedom Ring” to “Bling-Bling”?