Gang violence: the view from the Hive

The setting: the Hive, a community center organized largely by a group of marginally employed post-collegiate, anti-racist, white activists in Glenwood, a multiracial, working-class Greensboro neighborhood whose residents have displayed pride and pluck in upholding their community’s reputation against recent incursions of violence.

The participants: a multiracial crowd – varied in age, and representing neighborhood residents, students at NC A&T University, members of white and black anti-racist caucuses and homeless people -- packed into metal folding chairs, sat on the floor and stood in the back of the homely meeting hall.

The draw: a film about gang activity, a problem increasingly evident in Greensboro that has spurred a minor panic across the city and prompted questions about the city council and police’s commitment to keep residents safe. While the tenor of the larger municipal discourse has leaned towards promoting more aggressive law enforcement, the film Bastards of the Party and its audience tonight took a decidedly different tack – diagnosing the problem as racism and vanished industrial jobs, and the solution as countering fratricidal self-loathing with community self-direction.

Directed by Cle “Bone” Sloan, a member of the Athens Park Bloods, the 2005 documentary covers the both the gang history and larger sociological history of Los Angeles, a city exponentially larger and more ethnically diverse than Greensboro where a particular set of post-World War II race relations, dashed expectations for economic attainment among black, Latino and Asian residents, and stark juxtapositions between glitzy affluence and crushing poverty conspired to create a model of gang violence that is now being replicated around the country. Consider Los Angeles the bellwether; and though the movie doesn’t say so, perhaps the lucrative gangsta-rap media industry acts as a potent marketing tool.

The film deftly limns seven decades of history, beginning with the mass migration of Southern blacks to Los Angeles during the World War II manufacturing boom, when the police were said to have skimmed graft off the nightlife scene flourishing on Central Avenue. Then in the 1950s, the film tells us, an anti-corruption chief took the reins of the police department, implementing a practice of widespread harassment against black youth. Simultaneously, nascent black gangs are said to have sprung up to defend black youth against white gangs intent on confining them to segregated neighborhoods.

As the ’50s turned to the ’60s and whites decamped from once-exclusive bastions like Compton, the black gangs turned their antagonism on one another.

Let me interrupt the narrative briefly to say that two fascinating themes emerge from this film. First is the premise that the organization of gangs is intimately tied to the organization of revolutionary black formations, with warring factions uniting in the late ’60s and then again in 1992 to pursue shared aims of community empowerment, only to be divided against each other by governmental forces and redirected towards fratricidal purposes. Second is a notion richly explored in scenes showing empathetic encounters between members of the rival Bloods and Crips gangs that suggests a capacity for breaking the cycle of violence.

One of the signal moments in this story is the eruption of the Watts riots in 1965, which were touched off by an incident of white police brutality. The movie tells us that after the riots a charismatic young black leader named Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter emerged from the Slausons street gang and, inspired by the example of the Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif., helped found a Los Angeles chapter. Instead of scuffling with other black groups, the Panthers focused their energy on arming the black community against the police and on implementing free-meal programs and other social services.

Carter was killed during a meeting with Us, an organization that emphasized cultural nationalism in contrast to the Panthers’ orientation towards political change, on the campus of UCLA in 1969. Although the exact details of Carter’s death are not fully explored, former Panthers interviewed for the film express little bitterness towards Us, instead blaming the FBI for stirring up division between the two groups.

In the vacuum left by the destruction of the Black Panther Party and Us, the Crips emerge as a social force among black youth in south-central Los Angeles. The term is reportedly an acronym for Community Revolutionary Inter-Party Service. With self-gratification and individualism gaining cultural preeminence in the ’70s, the Crips’ original focus on community upliftment devolves into increasingly violent thuggery. Non-affiliated black youth, fed up with the Crips’ arrogance, organize into the Bloods.

Sloan tracks down Mike Davis, a writer who exquisitely captured the social anatomy of Los Angeles in a book called City of Quartz, to provide the wide-angle, sociological backdrop for the explosion of gang activity in the decades that follow. Beginning in the mid-’70s, Davis says, deindustrialization set in and manufacturing jobs gradually disappeared. Young black men whose fathers had been able to count on employment in unskilled manufacturing jobs found themselves without the means to earn wages sufficient to support families.

Quick on the heels of deindustrialization came the vertical organization of international drug trafficking networks into efficient corporations that increased the profits and raised the stakes of their trade. Entrepreneurial black youth, otherwise unengaged in the mainstream economy, provided a ready supply for the retail marketing positions of a new cocaine product called crack. Where once young black men were expected to choose between “bangin’ and slangin’,” Sloan says, now they were supposed to do both. And in the context of the larger society, they became all the more expendable.

“Nineteen ninety-two, I think it was a great year for me,” Sloan says. Some people call the upheaval that followed the police beating of Rodney King “a riot,” he adds, but “I call it a rebellion.” We see footage of black youth chanting “take off the red and take off the blue” as the fires rage. Sloan ventures alone into Crips territory and is greeted with respect and friendship. A truce ensues, but pervasive patterns of vengeance soon undo it.

Sloan describes the engine behind gang violence as similar to the motivations that drive soldiers: “It’s about the man that died next to you that you loved,” he says. “That’s pretty much it, man.”

He reflects on how the Bloods slur the Crips as “crabs,” and the Crips reciprocate by insulting the Bloods as “slobs” – words that operate much like “jap” or “gook.” Each side calls the other “nigger.” You wouldn’t call someone you intended to kill a brother, he reasons, it wouldn’t make sense. When the other person is stripped of their humanity as a crab, slob, nigger, taking their life becomes an easy task.

The film ends with a scrolling montage of photographs of slain gangbangers accompanied by their street names, which are translated into their full given names, thus restoring their humanity.

“I love my neighborhood,” Sloan concludes. “I’ll never denounce my neighborhood. But I denounce banging.”

The handful of quotes reproduced here will give a poor representation of the flow of discussion, but responses from members of the audience demonstrated a sense of engagement with the challenges of societal violence and hopelessness.

“I have kids nine, ten and eleven,” said Todd Warren, a white Greensboro resident who teaches in Winston-Salem. “I know they’re not gang members, but they’re idealizing gangs. I see it in their notebooks. It’s what they’re conditioned to.... I see with my school kids this is where they feel accepted. One thing gangs do very well is culture.”

TC Muhammad, a member of the Nation of Islam, suggested that the acceptance of death in the cause of fratricide should be re-channeled into a willingness to die in service of revolution.

Ted Nashland, a young white college graduate who lives in the College Hill neighborhood, jumped into the discussion, raising the specter of ecological deterioration.

“He’s talking about a war against black people,” Nashland said of Muhammad. “There’s a war against humanity. The system has to go down.... There’s got to be a spiritual revolution. There’s gonna be blood in the streets. I’m not going to be a pacifist.”

It’s difficult to tell where things go from here, if anywhere. Speaking on behalf of the organizers, Muhammad urged attendees to show up for the next Greensboro City Council meeting to advocate for an increased citywide minimum wage and to attend the next Guilford County School Board meeting. Names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses were collected at the door for the purpose of contacting attendees for later initiatives.

The revolutionary talk could seem abstract and detached from matters of everyday survival. So I asked Wesley Morris, a recent graduate of NC A&T University, how he thinks the dehumanization of black people and fratricidal violence should be addressed.

“It’s hard to address it from inside our community,” Morris told me. “Human rights struggles have always been about people raising their own cognition.... There’s going to have to be a lot of work. There’s no need to beg the state. The state has already made its statement about where it wants to put resources.”

Still, I found myself questioning where the forward movement might be, so I asked Morris where he places his hopes. His answer seemed to echo the Black Panthers’ ethos of self-resourcefulness and community mutuality, along with a much older, Old Testament moral code.

“I place my hopes on the inside,” he said, “on myself and God. You have to have standards of your own.”