Congratulations to Olivia Johnson for receiving first place at the Be Empowered Poetry Contest, created in partnership with See Jane Write, LLC. This project was made possible with support from Create Birmingham, the City of Birmingham, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
“Ghetto Roots”
They call it ghetto.
Pallets stacked into beds, lots of pig on the grill,
A hustle stretched thin just to make a meal.
But lemme take you back,
Way back to when our ancestors’ backs broke
Under a sun that didn’t love us either.
Pallets?
The wood scraps they tossed aside,
Used to carry cotton, sugar, and blood,
We turned into survival.
Beds from nothing ‘cause they gave us nothing.
Is it ghetto, or is it resilience?
Y’all mock the crib frame but not the system
That left us with splinters for a foundation.
Swine?
You wrinkle your nose at chitterlings,
Call ’em “chitlins,”
But who handed us the scraps?
Slave masters took the loins, the ribs, the ham,
Left intestines for the “less than,”
But we seasoned ‘em with soul and called it dinner.
Now y’all call it “soul food” at your overpriced bistros.
Who’s ghetto now?
Cornrows?
You call them ghetto, unprofessional, a fad.
But cornrows were blueprints for freedom.
We braided maps into our hair
Rows to show the way to the Underground Railroad.
We wove grains of rice into the plaits,
Because starvation wasn’t an option on the road to liberation.
What you call a hairstyle was a survival tool,
A resistance art form.
And now you wear it for clout,
Erase the roots but keep the look.
Who’s really ghetto?
The way we talk?
You laugh at the way we flip words,
Turn “ain’t” into an anthem,
Slang into a melody that flows like the rivers they crossed us over.
But did you know our tongue was stripped bare?
Forced to trade Yoruba for yes sir.
Plantation whispers became survival codes,
AAVE is rebellion embedded in rhythm.
“Ghetto” is what you call it;
We call it speaking in the key of freedom.
Y’all mock it, then remix it,
Put our dialect on TV, then say it’s yours.
Even love,
They call it hood love,
Laugh at how we yell out nicknames,
How we kiss with fire and hold on tight,
But our love is a miracle.
During slavery, they tore apart Black families,
Sold husbands to one state, wives to another.
We couldn’t legally marry,
So we jumped brooms and built bonds no whip could break.
They called us breeders;
We called it survival.
They punished us for loving at all.
Now they call our affection too loud,
But we’ve been loud for every ancestor
Who was forced to love in silence.
They made us ghetto.
Ripped us from lands where we were kings and queens,
Shoved us into projects,
Cracked our schools, and broke our communities.
They feared our brilliance,
So they tried to bury it.
But still, we rise,
Still, we flip struggle into culture.
You call us ghetto.
I call us genius.
We’ve turned struggle into style,
Pain into poetry,
Scraps into sustenance.
We spin survival into an art form,
Alchemy of the oppressed.
So keep your labels;
We’ll keep our ways, our culture, and our soul.
Learn more about the Be Empowered poetry contest here.
