Review of “Divide & Conquer: Race, Gangs, Identity, and Conflict”

Abstract

The brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 sparked what has often been described as a nationwide “racial reckoning.” Floyd’s killing and subsequent protests appeared to lend legitimacy to a worldview in which race is both an immutable reality and an explanation for reality; accordingly, injustices ought to be understood in identitarian terms and struggles for redress pursued on that basis. Institutions across society have scrambled to embrace these sensibilities, decrying white supremacy, affirming that “Black Lives Matter,” hiring consultants to change workplace culture, and sending books on antiracism to the top of best-seller lists. What all this means for the George Floyds of the world—the most dispossessed segments of the laboring classes; jobless, poor, and reliant on petty crime for survival—remains decidedly unclear. In Divide & Conquer: Race, Gangs, Identity, and Conflict, Robert D. Weide is interested in a very different sort of racial reckoning: a recognition of “race” as a lie promulgated by the ruling class in service of social control, and the attendant embrace of racial identity by the working class as a fatal mistake. His analysis lands like a Molotov cocktail, exploding the racialist ideologies that give shape not only to much contemporary scholarship, political chatter, and community activism, but—most importantly to the author—also to the gang dynamics pervading the streets of Los Angeles and the prisons of California.