Fresh Loaf

Back in May, I used the word “ghetto” in a headline to describe an impoverished,  crime-ridden stretch of road in central Atlanta. As a result, I learned the hard way that the word carries so much baggage that readers are turned off merely by seeing it in print, no matter how technically accurate its usage seems to be.

But, as the AJC’s Jim Galloway points out, when a white Georgia Congressman uses the word “ghetto” in a casually dismissive reference to folks who are poor, elderly and presumably black during a campaign stop before an overwhelmingly white audience — well, you’ve got the makings of a Macaca moment.

Congressman Nathan Deal

Just as in the case of now-ex-Virginia Sen. George Allen, who was videotaped making a casually dismissive taunt aimed at the Southeast Asian man holding the video camera, Rep. Nathan Deal was recorded by his opposition telling a Cherokee County crowd about his approach toward requiring proof of citizenship for federal or state health care benefits:

“We got all the complaints of the ghetto grandmothers who didn’t have birth certificates and all that. We wrote some very liberal language as to how you can verify it. My mother was born in 1906 and she didn’t have a birth certificate. They didn’t give birth certificates back then. But we got her one, because you can do it under the proper procedures of your state.”

A video of Deal’s bone-headed statement has been posted to YouTube by the campaign of Secretary of State Karen Handel, who’s running against Deal for the GOP nomination for governor. On Galloway’s blog, the clip has attracted nearly 300 comments, many from readers who characterize Deal’s choice of words as bigoted.

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1. The word is a ‘ghetto’ (We posed a question to readers — Is the word “ghetto” so off limits it’s become, um, ghettoized? — and y’all had some interesting things to say. Thanks!)

2. Atlanta: America’s ’second least safe city’? (The stats suggest that could be the case, but some aren’t so sure.)

3. Roy Barnes: Tanned, rested and ready (Barnes is baaaaaaaack! And the governor’s race is about to get a helluva lot more interesting.)

4. Biden to Perdue on rail funding: ‘Georgia gets nothing’ (VP: Just joshin’, Sonny!)

5. Less-than-fond memories of Barnes’ first term (Not everyone is enamored of the former guv and his bid to get his old job back.)

*This blog post has been edited to correct an error.

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Speaking from the grave this afternoon, king of rock and/or roll Elvis Presley has responded to Scott Henry’s recent post about whether it’s appropriate to use the word ghetto to describe certain neighborhoods.

Elvis responds to Scott Henry

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Words can hurt.

Any writer knows that words can explain and educate, but they can also inflame and belittle. That’s why we carefully choose the words we use. An ill-chosen word can stop a reader in his tracks, distracting him from the point of a story.

The day my most recent cover story was published — concerning crime on Boulevard and a proposed redevelopment of the street — I left for vacation, little knowing I’d set my editor up for a hailstorm of controversy (at least within our office).

Even when I got back yesterday, I didn’t suspect any problems. The story had received a healthy number of lengthy comments online and another half-dozen e-mails, nearly all of them positive and none mentioning any concern over word choice. But then, those people likely read the story online, where the title of the article was, “Down on Boulevard: Positive change might finally come to Atlanta’s lawless street.”

On the cover of the print edition, however, we went with a different title. This is typical; we have limited space on the cover and are forced to get the point across in fewer words. Underneath a photo of a street sign for Boulevard, the title on the print edition read:

Midtown’s lawless ghetto readies for a revival

I had chosen these words carefully. Headline-writing is a balancing act; you want to grab people’s attention, but you should be accurate. The more I’d learned about Boulevard during my reporting, the more the area seemed to fit the definition of a ghetto, which Webster describes as “a portion of a city in which members of a minority group live; especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.”

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