Hood

'You got conections at the schools?' Jax asked.
'Some. What schools you talkin about? I aint know nothing about Queens, or BK or the Bronx. Only here in the hood.'

Jax scoffed to himself, thinking, 'hood,' shit.
He'd grown up in Harlem and never lived anywhere else on earth except for army barracks and prisons. You could call the place a 'neighborhood,' if you had to, but it wasn't 'the hood.' In L.A., in Newark, they had hoods. In parts of BK too. But Harlem was a different universe, and Jax was pissed at Ralph for using the word, though he supposed the man wasn't disrpecting the place; he probably just watched a lot of bad TV.

Why would calling Harlem a 'hood' be disrespectful from Jax's pov?

Because "hood" means a ghetto.

'Fred, it's Lincoln. I need some help again.'
'My friendly fella down in the District help you out?'
'Yep sure did. maryland too.'
'Glad to hear it. Hold on. Lemme shoo somebody on outa here.'

What's "shoo somebody on outa here?"

"Let me get rid of the person I'm presently with (so that we can talk in private)."

To "shoo" someone or something is to make them go away from you -- you would literally say "Shoo!" to chickens or dogs that were clustering around you in the yard and make vigorous hand motions to get them to disperse; the term has since come to mean dismissing anyone from your presence, especially if it's sort of peremptory.

Oh, I see. I thought the author was using 'chat linguistics' here since he was quoting somebody just like he did "lemme." That's why I didn't bother to look it up.

Could you also elaborate on the "hood" part? Why would it be ok to call an LA neighborhood "a hood" if the only thing wrong with the term is that it means ghetto? Doesn't make a whole lotta sense to me right now.
Thanks

Well, "hood" can actually have more than one connotation. It can be an affectionate term for one's neighborhood (which is where the term comes from). It can mean territory, in the gang sense -- our hood versus their hoods. And it can also mean ghetto, or carry the sense of being a poor and violent part of town.

I suspect that Jax is taking offense to Ralph's use of hood because he objects to more than one of these nuances. Ralph is calling Harlem a "hood" in the sense of neighborhood or territory -- as opposed to Queens or the Bronx. But I get the sense from that passage that Ralph is not actually from Harlem, while Jax is, and so Jax feels that Ralph has no right to be "claiming" Harlem with such a term -- it's a little presumptuous.

He is also affronted by the ghetto connotation of the term -- he points out that other areas might rightfully be called "hoods", like parts of LA and Newark, but he feels that Harlem is very different in feel and the term doesn't fit. (Harlem was traditionally black and poor, but it also had a certain amount of class and pride in its cultural sophistication that places like, say, South Central can't claim, so he feels that being lumped in with war zones like that denigrates the place -- hence "disrespecting".)

Third, I get the feeling from Jax's contempt for "bad TV" that he dislikes the pop culture stereotyping that reduces and tries to fit all black urban areas into the gangsta rap mold, and is irritated by the cultural baggage of terms like "hood", which aren't necessarily appropriate for his part of NYC. I tend to associate "hoods" more with the west coast than the east coast, myself, although I know the term is used all over these days -- largely because of this kind of mass popularization. And there is a certain rivalry between the two regional subcultures, or has been in the past.