"It's interesting to me that some years ago, people were asking for inclusiveness," he said. "If a black person created this game, some people would probably still be offended, but you have to wonder if there would be so much protest," he said. Last year, hard-core rapper Ja Rule won an Image Award for outstanding hip-hop/rap artist.īoyd, who is black and finds Ghettopoly offensive, said the NAACP and others who dislike the game are applying a double standard. Yet this year, Nelly was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for outstanding male artist he did not win. cocked, ready to let it go" - glorify gunplay and the mistreatment of women as hallmarks of ghetto life. Hit songs such as "P.I.M.P.," by 50 Cent "Big Pimpin'," by Jay-Z and "Country Grammar," by Nelly - which blithely rhymes about driving past a rival's hangout armed with a "street-sweeper. "When you put the culture out there, you have to understand that people will take that culture in a direction that is unique to themselves," said Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and author of a book on civil rights and hip-hop. Urban Outfitters recently stopped selling the game.īut even as the protests against Ghettopoly mounted, some African Americans said the demonstrators were overlooking something: The game, they said, exists because of negative images spread by certain African American rap artists, abetted by white record labels and white-owned television outlets such as MTV. Friday, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume wrote Chang, of Saint Marys, Pa., to denounce the game as "reprehensible," and the organization's branches in Seattle and Philadelphia recently condemned and picketed stores of the Philadelphia-based Urban Outfitters chain for selling it. But few black people seemed to want anything to do with it. When Ghettopoly hit the market about a month ago, sales were brisk, Chang said in an interview last week. It prominently features a black man holding a bottle of malt liquor in one hand and a gun in the other, and has "playa" pieces that include a pimp, a prostitute, a rock of crack cocaine and an Uzi. The result was Ghettopoly, a biting parody of ghetto culture that mimics Monopoly. Chang said he was watching a rapper show off his "ghetto-fabulous" mansion on the show "MTV Cribs" when an idea struck him: "Why don't I make a board game that a guy like this would want to put it on his coffee table?"
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