Gangster Culture

In the wake of the long-overdue downfall of Don Imus, it seems that lots of folks are interested in talking about hip hop and gangster culture. Yes, it's an awkward spectacle which somehow shines an incredibly dorky light on stuffy-nosed non-sequitur-wielding commentators. But it does seem like a conversation worth having. So let's talk.

Mind you, neither I nor most Black folks I know (an admittedly skewed cross-section of progressive-minded adults) can stand the "gangsta rap" pumped out by mega-corporations; many consider it a degrading affront. Some of my friends — and I'm inclined to agree — go so far as to call commercial rap videos a new form of blackface, because we have white folks being entertained by, paying for, and profiting from negative stereotypical images of Blacks. The fact that many African Americans also buy into those images doesn't change the overall economic and cultural equation.

Of course none of this excuses the culture of violence and misogyny which informs a good deal of corporate rap. So let's talk about the culture of violence and misogyny.

We live in a culture which celebrates the machinery of mass violence and extols the heroic virtues of war. We live in a culture where misogyny is the norm, where women are raped and battered and objectified and demeaned and otherwise abused every day, every hour, every minute, without much ado. We live in a society whose leaders speak of killing and humiliating their enemies with chest-thumping glee and juvenile posturing. We live in a society whose budgetary priorities demonstrate a psychotic obsession with body-shattering weaponry and a distinct lack of interest in the health and well-being of human beings.

So I agree with those who are saying that it's time for all of us to confront the virulent culture of violence and misogyny and crime that is polluting our world. And it begins at the top: with the corporatist kleptocracy of the US government, the global gangster state which dominates and exploits through violence and intimidation and the hoarding of wealth, granting favors to loyal subjects, issuing threats to the unruly, and killing rivals. If we can eradicate the culture of violence and misogyny and crime at the top of our society, then just maybe we'll have a shot of eradicating it at the bottom too.

All that aside, in my opinion we do have a problem with mass-media representations which glorify gang violence. Notably, the most highly-acclaimed television series of our time tells the story of an out-of-control foul-mouthed misogynistic group of gangsters who regularly murder and rape with impunity: The Sopranos. The protagonist, Tony Soprano, is a semi-sympathetic character whose leadership role in his criminal gang is portrayed primarily as a psychological burden; the pain to his torn conscience receives more play than the pain he inflicts. So if we're to do away with the glorification of gangster culture in the mass media, The Sopranos is a good place to start.

Of course that's not going to happen. Because many white critics of gangster culture are actually talking about Black people. And the reason is simple: they're racist. They look at Tony Soprano or Don Corleone and they think, He's a good guy who does some bad things. They look at 50 Cent or Snoop Dogg and they think, Black people are dirty thugs.

Actually, every racial and/or ethnic group in America has its history of street gangs. As deplorable and unfortunate as it is, the reality is that gangsterism is a predictable response to certain social conditions having nothing to do with genetics. Nevertheless, the story of African American gangs does indeed have unique characteristics, because the African American story is unique. So let's talk about Black gangs.

I've been thinking about Black gangs for many years, ever since my very first day at a public junior high school in Los Angeles, when I witnessed my first gang fight; the brutality of the beating and the powerlessness of witnesses to intervene was a jarring experience. No weapons were produced that day; but as we got older, guns began to appear in lockers. I remember one of the first guys to befriend me at my new school was a gregarious Black kid, and a notorious gangbanger, named Alan, who sat next to me in homeroom; in the 10th grade he got shot in the leg, forcing him to walk with a cane; in the summer before our senior year, he was shot to death. Obviously he was far from the only one, but he happened to be a friend. Soon after I graduated they set up metal detectors in my old school. None of this sits well with me. It's bad enough living in a society soaked in white supremacy; but when people of color are killing one another, it just gets stupid crazy depressing.

Ever since I became aware of Black gangs, I've also been aware of intense criticism of those gangs from within the Black community, as well as grassroots activism aimed at countering their appeal and effect. I remember special school assemblies in the gym during which police, teachers, parents, victims, and activists railed against gangsterism. I remember after-school programs aimed at risk reduction. I remember boycotts and protests against certain rappers or albums. So when white pundits imply that the Black community as a whole has been tolerant of or complacent about gangster culture, I see it as a flagrant display of ignorance.

That's far from the only area of ignorance. I'm guessing that few Americans know about the genealogy of Black gangs, their political roots, and the role of the white power structure in feeding their development. Because modern Black street gangs essentially arose from the still-smoldering ashes of the Black Panther Party and the Us Organization, groups whose objectives were to uplift the Black community. In the 1960s these organizations were considered so threatening to the white establishment that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI launched the infamous Cointelpro operations with the explicit aim of destroying those parties, assassinating or imprisoning their leaders, subverting their goals, undermining their legitimacy, decimating their memberships. And in many ways it worked.

The hits to Black political leadership and organization, in combination with the systematic dismantling of America's urban industrial economy in the name of "free-market globalization", left many Black communities in freefall. Furthermore, as factories and jobs disappeared, so did many crucial social services and safety nets, under the guise of ending "big government" and "tax-and-spend liberalism". This political and economic vacuum became the incubator within which street gangs would flourish. But the final factor, which really heated up the gang-incubator and got the criminal subculture off and running, was the introduction of crack cocaine to the inner cities, smuggled into the US from South America by the CIA. In the 1980s the CIA directly sold massive volumes of cocaine to the Crips and the Bloods, and used the profits to fund right-wing terrorist insurgencies in Nicaragua, Colombia, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Once crack took hold, young Black gangsters started making money and the subculture of drug-dealing and prostitution blew up. At the same time, the government launched the "war on drugs".

And that's how it goes in a white supremacist society. Black folks are uniformly blamed for every hardship that white society heaps upon them. When mainstream narrative discourse lacks social context, historical perspective, cultural knowledge, or societal awareness, the plight of African Americans is implicitly pinned on some genetic defect rather than on the persistent nefarious attempts of white supremacy to undercut, attack, and destroy all efforts at Black uplift at every turn.

That being said, I also feel that communities of color have all too often played into the white supremacist playbook, fighting amongst ourselves when we could be lifting one another up. To me, personal responsibility means that it's up to each of us to avoid falling into all those traps which are so carefully laid out for us, and social responsibility means that we look out for one another as well. Of course, when the field is this tilted — when those who wish to oppress people of color hold so many levers of power while we hold so few — it's going to be tough. But the only option is to keep on trying.

As for the commercial "gangsta rap" promoted by the corporate media, there's no question that much of it is vile misogynistic crap which fetishizes gangster culture in a certain shallow, fictional, decontextualized manner. Sure, many Black rappers probably moved contraband for a time, just as many white rock stars probably flipped burgers. But I don't see much of a relationship between the sparkly Disney-gangsta world presented on Viacom and the gritty piss-and-vomit-stained stairwells where deals go down in real life. Frankly, commercial rap videos look more like the glossy masturbatory spreads in Maxim or FHM than the streets of Harlem or Compton. If rappers really wanted to "keep it real", then every crew would have a few less cats in each successive video.

In the end there's nothing glamorous about gangster culture, whether it's crackhouses and prostitutes, or the exploitative misogynistic fantasy world of poser pop-rap, or the quaintly-racist murder-humor of The Sopranos, or the president's smack-talk of "dead or alive" and "bring em on". Gangster culture is death and rape culture. If you oppose it anywhere, you should oppose it everywhere.

I'll wrap up with a clip from a documentary I happened to catch on HBO last month, entitled Bastards of the Party, directed by Cle Sloan. It covers some of what I've discussed in this piece and is well worth watching.

Peace.

Comments

[Sylvia]

Wow. Kai, you might as well put this on your sidebar now. Go go go go go. ;-)

[Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez]

Another great zeitgeisty post by tha Kai. I'll come back to watch the vid, gotta go. But great post, my friend.

[Yolanda Carrington]

Kai---I'ma bring people over here, straight to this science you done dropped. I'm so damn TIRED of people trashing hip-hop without facts I don't know what to do!

[Vincent]

Amen, brother. The history and context you describe is as real, as it is under-reported, and by extension unknown. There is something else that strikes me cold. The country's fervent fascination with gangsta culture has a scary subtext that I have seen in bars, clubs, and underground scenes. I believe there are some folks, in growing numbers sadly, of all races (many white) that are tired of this social experiment called democracy and find civility to be damn complicated. They want a "simpler" system by which to get through life. This ignorant, uninformed, misguided, and sometimes flat out bigoted group fantasize about ganster culture. They glamorize those we see in the media, as well as "the gangsta" they think they know from a group or neighborhood. They yearn for a government who will just "take care of business" without having to deal with the rule of law, human rights, and civic decency. An eye-for-eye, unless it is their's of course. It is an ugly socio-subconscious thread that weaves into this country's addiction to gangster culture.

Thanks for knowledge and dialouge,

v

[Nanette]

Excellence, once again, Kai. So many people try to not only apply different standards to "Black gang culture", but also to pretend that it (and other gang and violent activities) happens in a vacuum, arising out of something to do with being non white or of an inferior culture, rather than being the result of not only an overall culture, but an overall strategy.

It is extremely important for many in White America, including some "liberals" and "progressives", to view non-White people, Americans and otherwise, as... well, let's see. Equal, but not ready yet to make it on their own. Or something like that. I can't quite get to the terms I mean, but I suspect that in this crowd, I don't really need to expand too much.

I was in a chatroom a year or so ago and we were discussing something... race, crime, the US, poverty, whatever, and this Australian woman asked... "Are there any middle class Black neighborhoods?" Seemed like a silly question to me and other folks of color, but I realized from her conversation and that of other White Americans in the room, that they really had the impression (from the media, mostly, for the Australian) that there were no middle class communities of color, especially Black ones - that there was just overall endemic poverty, with a very few lucky ones "moving on up" and then living in White middle class communities, as those that had "made it".

There was no room (and still isn't, for many White folks) in their minds for the idea of strong, successful middle class Black communities, - which, no doubt, is one reason for the concerted efforts by both governments and locals to destroy the ones which have sprung up over the years... the Tulsa riots, and Rosewood being the well known efforts, but definitely not the end of the story.

Anyway, a bit of a digression there, but the part about the Black Panthers brought that to mind.

Gang culture has pretty much always been glorified in the US, as far as I can tell. I grew up watching the old movies from the 40s and 50s I guess... gangsters galore. There would be some moralizing, of sorts, of course... after all the gun battles, and drive by shootings and betrayals and women as property and so on and so forth... still... people are still quoting Cagney and Rooney and Bogart from those movies. That's also how every Italian got to be stereotyped as being Mafia. Even though there were Jewish and Irish and other Mafias too, of course, but they never seemed to catch on in the imagination of the public, for some reason.

That's not even mentioning all the outlaw movies. I wanted to be Jesse James when I grew up.

We revel in violence, in this country, from top to bottom, as you say... and then ask, "but how does this happen?"

[Ann]

Gangsat culture.

As far as I'm concerned, the original gangsta culture started with white America:

-Theft of Indian's land
-Kidnapping and enslaving African people into slavery
-Spreading diseases (smallpox, measles) that killed Indians and Africans, who had no immunity to those European diseases
-Herding Indians onto reservations
-Enacting Jim Crow segregation
-Creating the Myth of the Black Rapist and the Bad Black Woman (Whore/Slut/Ho)

And that's just to name a few.

White America has always been the biggest purveyors of gansta culture.

As long as it meant destroying black Americans, it was always all good.

[bint alshamsa]

Ann, I hear ya' and I agree completely. They came in as killers and thieves from the very beginning. The numbers of people they murdered and robbed far outweighs the damage perpetrated by today's gansta culture.

[Fire Fly]

I wonder if all those college kids who have "ghetto fabulous" parties know about this?

Because if, after all, black gangs in the US are a creation of white hegemony, then it casts something of a different light on the white kids who parody its imagery for fun. Aren't black Americans getting hemmed in from two sides (history and pop culture), then?

P.S. Yr comment form isn't recognising my blog URL. It's http://shewhostumbles.wordpress.com/. Sorry for the O/T aside.

[Ann]

Thanks, Bint.

Kai put up a spectacular post here on how progressive rap/hip hop continues to get short shrift and no attention, all the while racist/sexist rap/hip hop gets all the glorified attention, if only because that is what white corporate America wants to disseminate across the land and all around the world to disparage black Americans.

I am working ona post to call attention to white America's history of "gangstaism" and how it has destroyed countless lives/cultures/traditions of people of color ever since this country came into existence, ever since non-white people have had the horrible sad "luck" of having to cross paths with white men and women.

Yes, there are many of us who know who the real "gangstas" are.

Sadly, many, many others do not know, do not care to know, do not want to know.

[Elaina]

This is a really awesome piece, first of all.

Imus's fingerpointing in the media, in response to criticisms for his own typical White Person behavior, couldn't be more illustrative of typical White Person Defensiveness.

We all have a tendency to point back at those who call us out and attempt to blame them for the white supremacist bullshit we pull. I've done it. ALL white people do it.

We do it because we are enculturated with millions and millions of memes that tell us that WE ARE THE CHOSEN ones on the White Privilege spectrum. Even those of us who presumably wish to fight white supremacy find it difficult to absorb criticism from "the other." Even those of us who grow up with less relative privilege, from lower social castes, etc, working class and poor white folk. I think that we tend to do it even MORE in a reactionary, gut sense, because it's the only crumb that the master has thrown our way.

Thanks for writing this piece.

[Josiah]

I'm going to pass this article on to my friends. It does a better job than I could have of describing things I have seen with my own eyes, with a growing sense of anger, for years.

Like you said, very little of the debate within the black community over these issues makes it into the living rooms of white families whose children are being spoonfed images of black male gangsters. It's a lively, old and ongoing debate. And the problem is not just that a studio-produced caricature of inner-city black America has become a symbol of black folks as a whole in the popular white mind. It is that the caricuture perpetuates an upside-down ethical worldview among white folks in which black-on-black crimes are magnified at the same time as incomparably larger, more destructive white-on-black, white-on-red and white-on-everyone-else (including white-on-white) crimes shrink down to historical footnotes. The result is a false sense of victimhood feeding off of amnesia and self-deception: "Watch out for them!" is the flipside of "Why do they hate us?" Ugh.

This all fits right into the "War on Terror." There is no occupation, no US violence against Iraqis and Afghans, let alone US arms shipments and training of death squads. But there is "sectarian violence" and a "Taliban resurgence," according to the US media. It distracts attention away from the violence of the occupation towards the violence of the occupied, at home and abroad.

This is the same inversion tactic that made white Americans magically forget the legacy of rampant white male rape of black women, but turn a few spurious pieces of evidence of black male rape of white women into excuses for lynching and terrorism. Same deal with "Shock and Awe" and Fallujah being forgotten in a year or two but "sectarian violence" being an example of Islamofascism, or the carpet-bombing of Vietnam being forgotten and the actions of the Khmer Rouge next door being an Important Subject. Same shit, different day.

Anyway, great stuff and keep at it.

[Kai]

Thanks for all your comments, folks. I really don't have anything to add, which is why I haven't commented (I guess I already said my piece in the post itself). But I appreciate hearing all your thoughts, and am glad that there are many of us out here fighting the good fight.

[Jung]

Please excuse me for butting in, and alot of this sounds very convincing --your writing ability is obviously top notch-- but to me your generalizations do not provide enough excuse at the level of individual people. Racism is obviously apparent in American society, but the reason why it's not brought up so much is that hard work and a little bit of luck almost always pays off with a decent civilized living in this society. And it is not hard to figure out that hard work pays off.

And that's why I think Asians by and large don't pull out the race card. We know lots of folks who came over here with nothing and ended up pretty comfortable.

[Kai]

Jung, you just pulled your race card; and it's not a pretty one. I'm proud of how well Asians have fared in America, but there's a lot more to it than "hard work and a bit of luck" (talk about a shallow cliche generalization). Implicitly comparing Asian American history to African American history is too ignorant for words at an anti-racist website. I don't have time or inclination to educate folks who haven't figured out the difference between being kidnapped and violently enslaved for hundreds of years, and coming here voluntarily with intact dreams and histories and families and cultures and immigration-policy-required educations. You think Blacks don't work hard enough to be comfortable? Actually Blacks built this country's foundations of wealth with their sweat and toil and were rewarded with whippings, lynchings, and the hatred of "comfortable" fools. You've been warned; you can stick around and read if you like; or you can email me if you have grievances or genuinely wish to pursue dialogue; but no more comments with racist implications, thanks.