Danielle Bregoli Capitalizes on “Ghetto” Culture
“Danielle Peskowitz Bregoli is the infamous young teenage girl who makes her appropriation of “ghetto culture” quite literally her paycheck. “Cash Me Ousside, How Bow Dah” is now a phrase branded on shirts. Bregoli’s face is plastered on puzzles, tote bags, blankets, and plates. Our society can easily judge Bregoli with statements like how she is an “out-of-control teen” or deeply “troubled.” And yet, it seems she is being rewarded for her inexcusable behavior through the expansion of her social media platform -such as Instagram where she bolsters 5.7 million followers- to her appearance in artist Kodak Black’s “Everything 1K” video. Once again, mainstream society is buying into a white girl appropriating what she thinks is “ghetto” culture. From its inception during the Great Migration, the term “ghetto” was first coined by the white community to seperate and isolate themselves from people of color. Since then, it has been stigmatized, appropriated, capitalized and now through Bregoli, glorified. What is worse is that if Bregoli had been a woman of color, she would have never received “pass” and her reputation would be one of infamy rather than popularity.
“Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture,” Bell Hook said in her work “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.”
In the case of “cash me outside,” ghetto language and behavior is the spice in which Bregoli tries to flavor her persona. She is appropriating but is blinded by her own privilege as she thinks she is just being herself. This statement is supported in Hook’s reference of Marianna Torgovnick’s “Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives as Torgovnick.”
“ What is clear now is that the West’s fasciniation with the primitive has to do with its own crises in identity, with its own need to clearly demarcate subject and object even while flirting with other ways of experiencing the universe.”
Danielle Bregoli is a perfect example of how those who represent the white majority feel they have the right to act however they want without the recognition of who they are trying to immitate. The word “ghetto” is often times associated with people of color and in those applications, it is meant as an insult or received with negative connotation. Bregoli, on the other hand, can easily throw her fists in the air challenging people to come up and fight and she still is seen as harmless. Replace her with any colored girl and she easily becomes a threat. That is because “ghetto” and “hood” is no problem when white people decide to put a new face on and “act” the role. In those moments of appropriation, America’s colonizers take away all that holds communities of colors together, whether it be their culture, upbringing, ancestry, language, and art, and brand it as their own.
Hooks discusses the white youth’s fascination with what they presume to be colored culture.
As Hooks further explains this fascination the white youth and overall community have for the Other, she references the Hairspray movie. The main character Traci has a dialogue with her boyfriend where he says “Traci, our souls are black even though our skin is white.” Traci embraces this and pushes to be black as “blackness becomes a metaphor for freedom.” In this very same light, Bregoli rides on the appropriation of an environment and culture that she does not personally identify nor will never struggle with. She assumes the culture, believing it to be her ticket to being a “bad ass.”
Bregoli can just as easily think that she is a strong woman trying to express herself and that is the excuse many people give her. She has been given her own platform while countless women of color before her did not even get a chance to speak for themselves before they were labeled as dangerous and shot for it.
Miriam Carey, age 34, was hit five times for not stopping when asked to. They later found out through her autopsy that she had not been under any influence of drugs, alcohol, and weapons. She was not given the opportunity to defend herself before her life was taken away from her and her 1-year-old daughter. Carey had been going through a mental instability having had only been recently diagnosed with postpartum depression and psychosis. Mass killings have been excused by the justice system due to the killer’s mental illness but again we see no pass is given to women of color. The cases of Miriam Carey,Tanisha Anderson, Yvette Smith, Shelly Frey, Tarika Wilson, and 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones all result in these women’s voices being forever silenced because those who shot thought they were in danger.
When a young white girl goes on live television and threatens to fight and does it again on an airplane no one stops her. But women who have posed no true threat have been shot down and killed.
“The over-riding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate — that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten,” Bell Hook said.
Culture in this world transforms into property and people of color will always be seen as our white oppressor’s property. Colored bodies are seen to have been made for the enjoyment of white people. Danielle Bregoli’s fame and monetary success comes from her standing upon the bodies that lived in what outsiders see as the “Hood” or “Ghetto.” It is not someone else’s entertainment but a true life people live. Danielle Bregoli might say she is about the Ghetto life but her actions just prove to be mockery of the people whose home and reality is the Ghetto.
