Stop Glamorizing the Hood, Please
A Public Service Announcement
You know a hood when you see one if you’ve been blessed enough to walk its walls and inhale the perfume of lighters and childhood laughs that scatter and saunter across project and affordable housing rooftops — young staccato vocals flying high by graffiti that wrestles the bricks and stucco that adorns the tenements. The familiarity that rests in the feel is warm to you. It gets cold and you cup hands or flip up the ski mask and you only let go of the lining in ya’ pockets for hand daps or blazing an L or whistling for ya’ moms to toss your keys out her window.
Because the streets are cold here.
The sounds don’t ever change. I can leave and sit on a beach in La Jolla and come back to the Chinese spot and they’ll still know my order is chicken and broccoli with white rice and an egg roll, and we’ll skip the soda because we’re watching our sugar intake today.
We’ll breeze down a sidewalk and a window rolled down while a white clean Benz will play the latest Future or Jadakiss or whoever is hot to the age bracket that has the audio jack at the time. It can feel beautiful. It can be a full summer of ball playing or the time when autumn lasted two full seasons and you got maximum usage of your Wheat Timbs before the snow collected its debt. The weed stench will follow you long after the walk-by of it.
