Here I am I am out with this really beautiful sister. I mean she was bad(bad meaning dope)in everyway, great job. She was perfect on paper and our conversation was great. Until we got to the issues that surround young people that live in the neighborhoods of Chicago. I was a youth worker at the time in the Southside area for High School after school programs. I had the schools that had probation courts in the building so if teens who violated their parole they could be sent right back to juvenile or even prison. So I knew what they were going through. The aforementioned woman being from the suburbs and raised forty miles outside of Chicago didn't. What made me know she didn't was a statement that still bothers me to this day. She said, "why care about these animals". Suffice it to say girly and I didn't work out after that comment. Shocking as her comment was it wasn't the first time I heard people talk like that about Chicago's young people. So when I was too turned up when students from the High Schools I worked started getting signed to major rap labels and making their families money that they truly needed. It was also a wake up call that these young people had a voice and a story to tell, a story that America didn't want to hear and hates to look at.
Sasha Go Hard, along with Chief Keef, Katie Got Bandz pictured above are leading a new
movement of music in Chicago and the nation called "drilling music" some like to say it's ratchet. I strongly disagree
Seeing their success was like the big last laugh for the young people who many said they wouldn't become wealthy and successful. I am not saying that is why they blew up. I am saying that they are normal kids that have compelling circumstances which is tough for most adults to navigate let alone a 15 year old that has to watch over 4 brothers and sisters until their mother comes home from work. Looking at them as ratchet is not cool. People seem to think that because people like to twerk, dance, be in a gang, hustle that is so horrible. This the same way racism prevailed in the south. This attitude of looking at those different for you regarding them as sub-human is too uptight. W.E.B Dubois stated that he wanted talented African American men and women to return to the ghettoes to educate young people and uplift the people as a whole. This did happen for a time, however beginning in the early 1990s people started to lose their connection to the ghetto, they lost what it was like to have nothing in the house but your phone and how you would prank call people. They lost what is was like to be young and just being plan silly and creative because you have no money, now in the social media age people think they have an unique voice when they are mere followers of mainstream media. Mainstream media never indulges in things that are considered ghetto or ratchet until they can make money of it. That's when you get finally get Snoop Dog on Martha Stewart's show after he has been rapping for years!
The problem with deeming things ratchet is you miss out on what may eventually become mainstream, trying to be uppity or stuck up leaves you limited and lacking true knowledge. We are all connected good or bad, trying to separate yourself creates a socio-economic divide that is wide enough. -thegqlife
