Creativity Quote by Della Reese

Reese’s line is a masterclass in deflating nostalgia and sanitization with one blunt, lived-in contrast. She isn’t just naming poverty; she’s grading it. “Born in the slums, that was before the ghetto” rewrites the tidy timeline people like to imagine about American hardship. The “ghetto” is often treated as the original sin of urban misery, a shorthand with political heat and media-ready edges. Reese counters that with an older, rougher reality: the slums, unbranded and unromantic, before sociologists, before policymakers, before the word itself became a cultural container.

Her most cutting move is the word “refined.” It lands like a small laugh, but it’s also an accusation. “Ghetto” sounds like a category; “slums” sounds like a condition. Refinement here doesn’t mean improvement so much as packaging - a step closer to something legible to outsiders. By calling the ghetto “kind of refined,” Reese suggests that even our vocabulary can become a form of distance, turning suffering into a concept you can debate instead of a floor you can feel.

Then she drops the body into it: “right there on the ground.” That phrase drags the listener out of abstraction and back into material life - dirt, crowding, exposure. It’s also a reminder that Reese’s authority isn’t theoretical. As a Black performer who crossed eras of American entertainment, she’s marking the difference between surviving something and having it named for you later.