During my first year at Brooklyn College, I lived in the off campus dormitories located in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Coming from a very homogeneous neighborhood in Staten Island, one could say I experienced a bit of culture shock. I had been immersed in an inner-city area just like the ones described in Black Corona. I was completely immersed in “ghetto culture” for the very first time. Before moving to the area I had always thought about African American communities in a very binary way: some were assimilated into main stream culture and others were a part of ghetto culture. I never stopped to think about the fact that ghetto culture might have arisen from political and socioeconomic status. After a few months of living in Flatbush, I began to realize that maybe my neghbors acted the way they did because of their financial situation. It was interesting to see the parallels that I could draw between Flatbush and the neighborhoods that were being described in Black Corona. Both myself and Jacob Govan can give similar causes for ghetto culture just by living in an inner-city area (he much more than myself). This shows that ghetto culture is not a product of its people, but of their circumstance.

Question: Would inner-city areas improve if ghetto culture were renounced completely, or would it be detrimental to eradicate an entre culture without keeping some of its positive aspects?