How White Supremacy ‘Created’ Gang Problems
Street gang is by far misunderstood by the general public and the media as they are mostly portrayed and best perceived as group of violent, callous and brutal deviants that can be found in the worst parts of cities. However, if we take an in-depth look at the core of those neighborhoods occupied by gags, they can be understood as the formation of social actors that are practically involved in the ongoing process of interaction, determining the social status and identities within socially isolated local community social organization.
Street gang is also the accumulation of different characters with different personal backgrounds, as most of them are subjected to inescapable segregation and marginalization. Gang members are relatively affected by economic restructuring and racial disparities, being excluded from middle class groups which subsequently led to frustration and disappointment at the economic and institutional fabric of inner cities. Among other things, the high concentration of segregation in Black communities resulted in the issue of young Black males with delinquency being unsatisfied and disoriented, and receiving no specific guidance and formal social control from the city authority while they were living in a various form of the neighborhood, from mixed-income to high poverty underclass urban neighborhoods.
The participation in gang activities can somehow partially explain the ramification of racial disparities, whereas gang plays a vital role to compensate the disappointment at economic restructuring and abandonment of the rest of society. It appears that the social organizational structure of street gangs can only be best understood through intensive participant observation which requires one to blend in the street gang as Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for A Day did in his ethnographic studies as an attempt to fully broaden perspectives on the originality of street gangs. The public image of street gang had been dramatically reconfigured and wrongly depicted by the moral panic, exaggeration and overtraumatization of general media outlets from 1960s onward, as a group of rebellious and uncivilized savages in underclass neighborhoods that repeatedly engage in gang violence.
Recalling the history of African Americans, particularly in Chicago from the 1890s onward, there had been an unpleasant development, modifying social conditions that required both locals and migrants to cultivate the extensively complicated social change that were primarily existing in the assimilation process, struggle for cohesive existence in a shared spatial environment, migration, mobility, and territorial and occupational distributions for people. Upon the arrival, newcomers were significantly concentrated in designated areas where they shared their living spaces, steadily integrated to broader economy. With high volume of different ethnicities congregated in Chicago during the migration movement, from Jewish, Italian, Irish to Polish immigrants, the idea of segregation, nonetheless, had already begun since their departure from their original homeland, which was assumed to acclaim for themselves well-recognized sociocultural based identities.
The condensed population and high level of segregation eventually opened the pathway for the institutionalization of ghettos, it lately produced the intentional violence and discriminatory practices that gradually shaped and modified the formation of Black ghettos in Chicago. Since the 1919 Chicago race riot, the expression of racial hostility among whites over the increasing African American population near Bridgeport and postwar job competition forcibly segregated and maintained the poor Black folks in “Black Belt” where it was decidedly overcrowded and housing qualities were inadequate. Race riots at that time was initially engaged by leading group of white gangs that allowed such racial antagonism which consequentially unleashed the inordinate mayhem in July 1919.
Upon the 1919 race riot, it demonstrates the absence of black gangs as an organization that was responsible for protecting Blacks from purging outrage and series of physical assaults directly conducted by white gangs. Unlike white gangs, black gangs were not systematically politicized and conventionalized by integrating political system through patronage. Most of race riots that occurred in northern cities of the U.S in post World War I were markedly occupied by unrest response of unrestraint racist violence towards the increasingly growing development of black population.
White gangs were basically categorized with different visions as their roles played in the construction of the social image of urban cities far more sinister than typical group of social deviants. Regarding racial hostility against Blacks in Chicago, there had been a periodic strenuous assault on Blacks from May 1944 to July 1946 as the impact projected by white supremacist terrorism. Italian and Irish mobsters were secretly advocated by politicians and realtors, also including major supports from local police authority, to keep black people in ‘black belt’ and isolate them from white areas.
The white racist culture and repercussion of Italians and Irish communities in Chicago in early 20th century highlighted a significant take over of political framework, in which the vivid description illustrates the image of Irish dominated Chicago’s Democratic political force and ultimately devoured the patronage and police forces were primarily occupied by personnels with Irish heritage. While Italians and African Americans were critically important forces for Chicago’s Republican. This fact details a thoroughly concrete image of how African Americans were blocked illicit opportunity structure and more scientifically recognized institutionalization of organization with a sense of racial purity.
In contrast with dominance of Irish and Italian, black gangs were typically captivated by walls blended with stucco, racial marginalization and segregation applied by gentrification. Racist violence in Chicago has been happening for decades to keep black population in derailed societal parts of urban cities infused with poor public housing developments, dysfunctional infrastructures, and erosion of social stabilities and orders. The massive scale incarceration of Chicago’s black gangs in 1970s was serenely the most important factor which consequentially led the prominently critical phase of developments for gang institutionalization.
By following the institutionalization of gangs in Latin American countries, Chicago black gangs engaged in the proper modification for gang organizational structure which were influenced by revolutionaries in prison and the Nation of Islam. It is vehemently pervasive that the impact of ‘mass society’ or outside forces on inmate organizations in prison. This process of transition is described to be the spectrum of how gang took over the old inmate organizations by guile and violence and established themselves an institutionalized gang within penitentiaries. However, the street culture was still adopted and continuously preserved, which specifically portrays the unlikely characteristic that did not fully distinguish themselves from the previous version of past inmate groups.
The economic erosion in 1960s, was not surprisingly a secret to anyone in 1970s, when the economic restructuring of deindustrialization hit the Midwest expansively in that decade which began to erode the economic fabric of Chicago’s black neighborhoods. Nonetheless, Chicago’s residents were fully aware of the autonomous and collective efficacy of the whole conjunction of economic restructuring imposed by deindustrialization and subsequently black residents were overwhelmed by the irresistible tide of unemployment status.
Despite for the ambitious civil right campaign, Chicago Freedom Housing Movement, in 1960s led by Martin Luther King Jr. calling for substantially extensive liberal democratizing reform of housing, but also including quality education, transportation and job access, income and employment, health, wealth generation, crime and the criminal justice system, community development, tenants rights, and quality of life, the successfulness eventually brought black voters to settle in middle class neighborhoods, however, the social conditions of underclass neighborhoods were still rapidly deteriorating and opened the inception of demoralization.
The truly disadvantaged in underclass neighborhoods of Chicago resonated the impediment of greatly poor social conditions that hauntingly demonize the industrial capitalist society in the U.S. A devastating image of urban poverty highlighted the significant ambivalence of impoverished Third World countries where police harassment, gang violence and other sort of physical conflicts frequently happened.
The booming of high rise buildings in Chicago also relatively displayed a new era of industrial reconstruction that changed the urban landscape with gleefully unsolicited magnate of skylines that symbolically presented the the economic prosperity of the city. This trend also witnessed the establishment of high rise public housing in the 1960s that turned into gathering points for concentration of urban poverty and they quickly transformed into corporatization locations for gangs.
Upon the exodus of black middle and working class residents and declining economic base that could not afford to facilitate public housing sites in Black neighborhoods with best quality to meet the standardized housing criteria despite for homogeneous demographic characteristics of local tenants. African American neighbourhoods, for instance, Englewood and Lawndale later became a territorized sites for economically inclined gangs to exercise their outlaw capitalist entrepreneurialism. The underground economy of cocaine and heroine is poignantly viewed a steadily substantial and consistent economic engine to generate exceedingly tremendous revenue to accommodate Black neighborhoods and they were also hiring hall for stranded young outcasts on streets.
On one hand, there is paradoxical anomaly about how the emergence of street gangs and its relation with neighborhoods, whether or not constitute the urban poverty. It is supposed to acknowledge that Black communities all experience the pervasiveness of gentrification, but most importantly, the state of fatherless. Black men are stereotypically perceived as poor and irresponsible fathers, beside of other various form of social problems constituting the absence of fathers and plaguing black families (from limited employment opportunities, discriminatory mortgage practices and degradation of early-childhood learning program), it also consist of the criminalization of blackness in neighborhoods that is partly responsible for mass incarceration.
African Americans were simply subjugated by federal program of War on Durgs and they have been in correctional control, regardless of being self-consciously aware or not, since 1850, before the inception of the Civil War. In spite of laziness, immaturity, racial disparities or spending time for leisure activities, but mass incarceration, is in fact, a major factor for the tendency of black men’s disappearance resulted by racialized mass incarceration.
The formation of gang, in particular, can be explained as the reasonable cause of social conditions which local youth being unsupervised by adults, or they formed to protect their neighborhood against outsiders as they set off the grid of observation and inspection. Recent studies throughout the U.S cities suggest that while gang members from previous eras did, in fact, nestle in spaces with high congregation within the territory of their gang, which increased mobility among poor urban families and the influence of school busing have weakened the residency territory relationship. The establishment of the gang within a neighborhood suggests a newly institutionalized form of social control that requires recognition and obedience from local tenants in public housing projects across urban ghettos.
Under the poor conditions of urban ghettos, there is a psychological moratorium that presents the intersection between the transition of age span from childhood to adulthood, and the emergence of gang amplified by street socialization and subculture violence. There was a status crisis in the periodic development characterized by ambivalence and the unpredictability that prefixes the struggle of realizing social and sexual identities without certainty. Upon of that pervasive intensification, the struggle forced the youth increasingly relying on the encirclement of peers within the interplay of interconnected groups, and adult male role models were generally considered to be the ‘mentor’ guiding these groups of clueless, socially stranded and disoriented teens.
Nevertheless, these groups of peers were subjectively entrapped by the stressful families living in a remarkably marginalized community, while their social development was deliberately restricted and dependent on peers in long duration that exceeds beyond their adulthood. Subsequently, teens would eventually have themselves being caught by delinquency. It is remained to be seen as gang members are subjected to constant social struggles of determining their social status and identities in the very impoverished parts of cities, and the gang itself is profoundly recognized as a bonding attachment that replaces the notion of family.
Despite every effort of liberal normalization of racial equality, successful court challenges to housing market discrimination, open housing advocacy and legislation, the visible feasibility of segregation and racial disparities still appeared from every street corner in industrial cities in the U.S. This major contemplation exacerbated the ramification of deep- entrenching marginalization which forced African Americans to be entrapped in rapidly expanding and yet persistently isolated and ghettoized neighborhoods.
This problematic issue voices the concern over the social relation between gang members and families, whether the participation in the gang detaches the social relation with other social subjects in underclass communities. There should be a rudimentary understanding that explains for the perhaps unrecognized type of social relation between gang members and their families, as there is no rational categorization of this relationship since there is tremendous distinguishment between these two, as well as uncontrollable adjustment and responses to this issue.
The Postindustrial era saw the combination of deindustrialization, white privilege, intensification of segregation and marginalization applied by the sophisticated wrenching gentrification that proved the devastating aspect of ghettoization. Consequentially, residents in inner cities were largely forgotten and become perpetuating stigma, influenced by the uneasy spectrum of increasing joblessness, deteriorating infrastructure of inner cities’ neighborhoods, reinforced white stereotypes of blacks, families and communities.
