Residential Warfare: Reframing Black Gang Life Films through an Empathetic Lens and the Expansion of the Conversation on Black Existence

Still Here

Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds., <i>We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85</i>. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017. Pp. 320. $24.95 (paper).Terrion L. Williamson, <i>Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life</i>. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Pp. 128. $25.00 (paper).

The Queerness of Touch: Mutual Recognition and Deep Intimacy in <i>Moonlight</i>

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Weapons and violence are both real and mythic elements of gang life. Though violence is a real element of gang life, public perceptions about gangs may be exaggerated, invoking the idea of dangerous youth roaming the streets. The image of violent gang members is also embraced and used by youth on the streets to navigate their social world. Gang members often create personal and group-based myths by exaggerating their use of weapons and violence. This chapter examines the division between myth and reality in gang life. It reviews research to establish that weapons and violence are real elements of gang members' lives throughout the world. It further explores how myths emerge among gang members who have ample motivation for fictionalizing violence and weapons use. This chapter relies on the social psychological ideas of social constructionism, interpretive socialization, and identity to explain the existence of myths in gang life.

Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space

The Chicana/o gang story begins with the literary appearance of the pachuco/a figure in newspapers, rumors, gossip, and the vernacular and folkloric imaginations of Mexicans, Chicanas/os and Anglos from El Paso, Tejas, to East Los Angeles and even Fowler, California, in such works as Beatrice Griffith’s American Me (1948) and José Montoya’s “El Louie” (1972). It evolves to include tell-all stories by former Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia members, who detail their disenchantments with these pinto organizations and the very real dangers they represent. Complementing these literary representations of the pachuco and the cholo figure is Hollywood’s cinematic rendering of them in early Chicana/o gang stories, such as Kurt Neuman’s The Ring (1952), and in later films, such as Taylor Hackford’s Blood In, Blood Out (1993). Despite the different narrative forms, all these gang stories, with few exceptions, operate as cautionary tales of lives wasted away in gang membership. Some stories moralize; others simply seek to render a realist representation of gang life without judgment; still others seek to contextualize gang membership in complex ways to subtextually call for addressing the root causes of these “social problems.” Most of these narratives fall into one of two primary ideological camps. The first is the dominant camp; it seeks to represent gang life as deviant and destructive and functions to socialize Chicanos/as through these cautionary tales. The second is the insurgent camp, in which gang members represent themselves as products of the socioeconomic conditions of the barrio; it therefore relies heavily on understanding gang life as part of a barriocentric vernacular capitalism that renders those stories inherently valuable. The result of the first camp’s lens is that Chicana/o gang fiction (that which is represented by outsiders and non-gang members) and other fictionalized gang narratives often rely on oversimplified snippets or sketches of life in the barrio. They thus create inauthentic, one-dimensional, or stereotypical representations of Chicana/o gang members and the barrio itself. This leads to the continued barrioization (Villa) of Chicana/o life and Chicanas/os themselves. Most mainstream Hollywood Chicana/o gang films reproduce these logics. In fact, the majority of Hollywood Chicano gang films are set in East Los Angeles or the “greater Eastside”—an area that includes Northeast Los Angeles, Echo Park, Boyle Heights, and the unincorporated area of Los Angeles east of the Los Angeles River. What this means is that East Los Angeles remains Hollywood’s localized “heart of darkness.” By contrast, the second ideological camp relies on lived experience or what I term a “barrio-biographics” that privileges the barrio as the site of and cultural foundation for the gang member’s narrative and her or his epistemological and ontological formation, creating a “barriological” framework (Villa). These barrio-biographics are the core literary forces that drive authentic Chicana/o gang stories. It should also be noted, however, that pinta/o narratives differ from Chicana/o street gang narratives in that pinta/o narratives foreground the experience of imprisonment and the author’s or main character’s interactions with the carceral state as an added layer of their own epistemological and ontological formations in the barrio. Chicana/o gang narratives, broadly defined to include pinta/o stories and gang films, operate as cautionary tales but also as tales of coming into a “complete literacy,” as Luis J. Rodríguez would describe it. This complete literacy, in turn, allows Chicana/o gang members to articulate their own lives and choices, and complicates any impulse to moralize or render Chicana/o gang figures simply as “deviants.” Thus these Chicana/o gang figures and their narratives remain part of a history of real, realist, and fictive representations of themselves in the American imagination that provides them the space to contest their own cultural significations. Overall, some narratives celebrate and glamorize the Chicana/o gang figure as a revolutionary in the fight against white supremacy, while others that see this figure as regressive, violent, and, arguably, equally oppressive.

The Third Revolution

Reviewed by: The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 by Autumn Womack Rayvon Fouché (bio) The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 By Autumn Womack. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 288. As our varying cultures, societies, and communities embrace the changing nature of identity and we become more comfortable with the differences that define human existence, it is still relevant and important to investigate how we have gotten to where we are and examine the underpinning social, political, and cultural structures that have helped to fashion this reality. In a refreshingly interdisciplinary way, Autumn Womack takes up this task in The Matter of Black Living. The text launches this investigation with the provocative subheading "Undisciplining Data" in the introductory chapter, "Data and the Matter of Blackness." This beginning sets the stage for Womack's thoughtful and carefully argued study aimed at disentangling, and more optimistically disrupting, the processes by which Black folks and Black life are represented as data to quantify, systematize, organize, and ultimately solve the problem of Black people in the United States. Womack's point of entry is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when this American conundrum was simplistically known as the Negro Problem. What is most interesting about this text is that Womack leans away from the expected trajectory about race, Blackness, and data. That space is comprised of contemporary studies that reveal the ways algorithmic [End Page 593] biases shape Black lives, control Black communities, and precipitate a host of actions that continue the tradition of technological violence levied against Black people. Though Womack acknowledges the importance of these works, The Matter of Black Living propels us to a moment a century earlier, when the foundation of contemporary data violence was born. In this regard, Womack demands that we question the power of social scientific investigation that made data the gold standard of understanding and ultimately categorizing Black people and Black living. It is the interrogation into the ways that data have been deployed to circumscribe Black life that is a central concern of the book. It is not only the ways in which data and Blackness are co-constituted but the racialized imperative of social scientific disciplines that made Blackness the problem and the new technological tools of data acquisition and analysis the solution that this study brings into higher relief. Moreover, the text questions the processes by which the data of Black life were acquired, as well as how the desire to have a clean and tidy solution to the Negro Problem drove the need to universalize and flatten Black life. If the construction of the data and data sets that represent Blackness is flawed from the outset, then it is seemingly impossible for that data to become information, knowledge, or wisdom. The text navigates the interlaced claims "that black life and data cohered at the turn of the twentieth century, albeit asymmetrically and insufficiently; that African American cultural producers intervened into these debates along experimental lines; and, finally, that these experiments doubled as rubrics for literary and aesthetic practice" (p. 32). Three chapters that loosely correspond to the prior claims and focus on the technologies of the social survey, photography, and film animate the bulk of the book. In the chapter "The Social Survey: The Survey Spirit," Womack contends that social surveys were not just instruments for or methods of data collection but were modern visual technologies that reconceptualized our understanding for observing life. Thus, the social survey could provide an opportunity to conceptualize Black life beyond that of merely quantified data. The second chapter, "Photography: Looking Out," works through the interrelationships between photography as a technology of creating data and as a technique of capturing, revealing, and expressing the vitality of Black life. The third chapter, "Film: Overexposure," argues that the medium of film, for some Black people, was more than just a collection of moving images but could be an instrument through which Black people could record the rich textures of their own lives and intervene in the statistical rigidity required to answer the Negro Problem. Overall, Autumn Womack has authored a text that...

Reviewed by: Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America by Robert Brenneman Kristy Nabhan-Warren (bio) Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America. By Robert Brenneman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 294 pp. $ 24.95. Robert Brenneman's Homies and Hermanos is a thoroughly researched, engaging sociological study of transnational gang and evangelical Christian subcultures in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The author's aim is to make sense of these cultures and to understand more deeply the push and pull factors of gangs and evangelical Christianity for those adolescent and young adult Central Americans who join. Homies and Hermanos is at once a sophisticated qualitative sociology and at the same time an accessibly written book. Academics and non-academics alike who are interested in understanding the allure of gangs and evangelical Christianity in Central America more specifically, and on a global scale more broadly, will not be disappointed. Brenneman delivers a captivating portrayal of his Central American interlocutors and their complex social milieu. In the opening pages of the book, the reader is swept into the life of "JJ," a former ranflero, leader of the White Fence mara, gang, whose story begins with details of a life of life of poverty and abuse. It is a gripping entrée to the book's larger sociological investigation. We learn of JJ's entry into gang life at the young age of nine, his increasing involvement in his teens and rise to power as a ranflero, and his eventual decision to leave the gang for evangelical Christianity. JJ's narrative is one of many compelling narratives of hardship, and redemption in the book, and Brenneman contextualizes these narratives with a larger social history of transnationalism and a sociology of emotions. As he notes, there are many studies of gang entrance and membership, but far fewer studies of gang exit (15). Moreover, rather than focus on the individual gang members' psychological health as a push factor into gang membership, which he finds limiting because it tends to blame victims caught up in complex social constraints, Brenneman offers a much more nuanced and helpful exploration of the broader social reasons why young men and women decide to join gangs—and then later decide to leave them. Based on his interviews with sixty-three ex-gang members, as well as twelve sympathizers, the author discovered that poverty, problems at home, and stresses at school were the three primary reasons why Central American youth join gangs (74). To these male and female ex-gang members, gangs offered a hope of stability, family atmosphere, acceptance and protection that their biological and extended kinship systems failed to provide. The overarching sociology of emotions Brenneman uses as a frame for his study leads him to focus on shame as a key push factor to joining these violent transnational gangs. What linked all of his interlocutors' narratives was their shame—for being abused, for having an alcoholic parent, an absent mother and/ or father, for being poor, and for failures in school. Low self-esteem, he discovered in the course of his research, is connected to the overarching social constraints in which these youth find themselves. It is here in the book that Brenneman draws on the social theorist Randall Collins' interaction ritual chain theory approach to explain the complexity of emotions that ultimately leads young adults to join a gang and to undergo rituals of violence and sacrifice. Joining a gang, Brenneman argues, is less a rational decision than it is an accumulated emotional response to the various social push and pull [End Page 291] factors that accumulate (84-5). These young adults experience a rebirth when they undergo the ritual of brinco (jumping in), which is considered to be their bautizmo (baptism) and official membership into a gang (94). Newly baptized, their shame is mitigated by the violence done to them and that they in turn commit. Young men, who comprise the vast majority of Central American gang membership, experience a new kind of manhood and power via violent acts, and it is through these actions as homies that they gain respeto among their peers. The acquisition of tattoos, sex, drugs and guns...

Despite the growth in incarceration nationally and the subsequent increase in gang members in prison, much is to be learned about how inmates become involved in gangs and how gang membership is altered by prison life. The current study was designed to provide a descriptive analysis of gang entry and gang life among a sample of individuals who have served time in federal prison. Having applied the “push” and “pull” typology, we can see that motivations to join gangs may be consistent between street and prison gangs, even though the specific context may be markedly different. As is the case with street gangs, gang membership in prison plays a central role in the inmate experience and is often marked by violence.

Translation Section

Prior research has documented that youth self-identified as gang members comprise a different group than those identified by the Eurogang definition. These two groups of gang-identified youth, however, share similar risk factors and are also more violent than their non-gang counterparts. Other work, which has examined youth that both self-nominate and meet the Eurogang definition, finds that these multi-definitional gang youth score significantly higher on risk factors and offending than those youth who meet only one definition. The first aim of the current study is to expand on these definitional comparisons, as well as further research on gang desistance, by comparing the motivations for leaving the gang across self-nominated gang youth, Eurogang youth, and youth meeting both conceptual definitions. The self-nominated gang desistance literature suggests that, when leaving the gang, youth typically become disillusioned with gang life and begin to drift away from their gang friends. Of particular note is that motivations associated with violence are relatively infrequent. Given the more violent nature of multi-definitional gang youth, however, we may expect that these youth experience motivations related to violent victimization and violence fatigue. This study relies on both prospective quantitative surveys and retrospective qualitative interviews to compare motivations for gang desistance in a multisite sample of self-nominated gang and Eurogang-defined youth. This mixed-methods approach also allows for a comparison in the consistency of prospective and retrospective motivations for leaving the gang, which is the second aim of this chapter.

No description supplied