Vanessa E. Jones of the Boston Globe uses the Cora Daniels’ new book “Ghettonation” (see her companion blog here) as a jumping-off point for a discussion of how broad stereotyping of African American culture has become increasingly commonplace — and even accepted, in some contexts.

Daniels argues, “Ghetto is no longer where you live — it’s how you live. It’s a mindset that embraces and celebrates the worst.”

While Jones does mention others who take issue with Daniels re-interpretation of a “loaded word,” it’s hard to take issue with her analysis of how the “ghetto” image became reality: “When you think of hard - rock bands and hair bands of the ’80s, that didn’t take over and become the face of white men in the country. The problem now is there’s no balance of images, no balance of voice.”

The tolerance of stereotypes, in this sense, is really simply the inability to recognize an alternative to the stereotypes.

For Daren Graves, a professor of education at Simmons College, he sees this problem emerging most acutely in the transformation of hip hop from a counternarrative to a mainstream narrative:

The messages in today’s rap lyrics differ greatly from the ones of self-determination and Afrocentricity that dominated in the 1980s. Hip-hop was created as an art form by people who were oppressed as a counternarrative to the way they were being framed by mainstream culture. Now you have the quintessential example of that experience being co-opted, repackaged, and redistributed by mainstream industry for public consumption.

As this new image becomes the norm, a racial divide emerges, because white people have a difficult time seeing the power of racism:

The people who are oppressed say, ‘How can you say this?’ or ‘How can you do this kind of thing?’ …The structural aspect is so obvious to them because it’s holding them down every day. And the people with privilege go, ‘What’s the big deal? Maybe it’s wrong, but let’s not get upset about this because it’s just one incident,’ because they’re not aware of the structure in place that gives them privilege in the first place.

Of course, that’s no excuse. And ultimately, Daniels’ analysis focuses on how corporate America perpetuates and profits off this ignorance. When, Daniels asks, will we have the guts to stop buyin’ what their sellin’?