Ghettopoly is a Monopoly-style board game, which pokes fun at the seedier side of ghetto life, where the object is to build crack houses and brothels while trying to avoid being car-jacked. It has sparked public protests, the threat of a lawsuit, and the shut down of the maker's Internet online store. Still, amid passionate debate and controversy, thousands-blacks included-are flocking to the creator's web site to buy it.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hasbro, the maker of Monopoly, has threatened to sue David T. Chang, of St. Mary's, Pennsylvania, an Asian entrepreneur and Ghettopoly's inventor, for what it sees as intellectual property rights infringements. Elsewhere, black activists from The National Action Network, the organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton, and another group calling itself the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, have both attacked the game on the grounds that it defames and negatively stereotypes poor blacks. Hogwash.

While the game's concept may offend some blacks, it doesn't offend all blacks. While violence, racism, poverty and crime disproportionately affect blacks, they aren't the only one's impacted. Furthermore, the last time I checked black folk didn't have a monopoly-no pun intended-on poverty, suffering, and the difficulties associated with the ghetto. Jewish Americans whose families lived and died in the infamous Warsaw ghetto, or Hispanic Americans who have grown up in the barrio can tell you about ghetto life. Furthermore, contrary to what some black activists might have us believe, impoverishment doesn't equate to a lack of honesty, compassion, dignity, or the absence of pride, courage, or self-reliance. You can find these attributes in abundance in any poor inner city ghetto. It's ridiculous to assert that the stereotypes featured in this board game somehow besmirch all blacks or all people living in such conditions. We simply have too much opposing evidence.

The placards and protests of a few self-anointed "activists" and civic groups may have intimidated David Chang; but it's the free market that should ultimately determine Ghettopoly's fate. That same marketplace has made millionaires of others who by coupling their lewd, lascivious, brutal experiences with a strong back beat, have celebrated the violence, penury, and self-destructiveness connected with living in the 'hood. It's okay for gansta' rappers like Ja Rule, Nelly, P-Diddy, Ludacris, Fifty Cent, Eminem, Mystikal, and Tupac to get rich peddling the pain associated with poverty, but it's not okay for Mr. Chang? Is that the message? Apparently, yes. But who decides? I'll tell you who should. The consumer.

No matter how distasteful their products are, the David Changs and Snoop Doggs of the world are simply filling a market niche and meeting consumer demand and should be left alone to succeed or fail based on the merits of their ideas.

Instead of bashing the people and the products that glorify ghetto culture, the critics' time and energy would be better spent-especially in depressed urban neighborhoods- emulating the activities that bring goods and services to market.

Think of it. People would be so busy making money, creating jobs, and refurbishing communities; they'd have little patience or need for protests, picket signs, or the pied pipers of victimology.