A Call for Gang Amelioration
Movements of organized youths have peculiar manifestations in accordance with the time and space in which they congregate. Hence, it goes without saying that in writing this particular “Analysis of Gangs” certain ideological strands or applications of organization may not be readily seen in the ‘young thugs’ loitering in (y) our (neighbor) hoods. I simply wish to highlight positive elements or instances of gang organization in American communities in the hope that the elucidation of a positive essence may lead to a change in the engagement philosophy and strategies currently employed by what have come to be termed “Gang Outreach Programs”.
It may not be easy to see the beginnings of contemporary community youth organizations in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. The names Brotherly Love Over Oppression and Domination and Community Revolutionaries In Progress are testament in acronym to the Civil Rights Movement origins of the Bloods and Crips. A major role of community youth organizations has always been organization of minority constituencies and to bolster community protection against violence and sexual predation. They also served as a necessary support network for traumatized soldiers returning from the Vietnam War. The fact that contemporary 'black gangs' share a geneology with civil rights organizations of the 60s is a little known but important fact. We need ask ourselves if any positive practices or techniques can be gleaned from these early community youth organizations for better traction in gang outreach programs today. Gangs of today have become envenomed via the inception of crack cocaine and automatic weaponry from the most nefarious of sources.
Use of drugs, gun violence, and lack of education has all been heavily correlated to the impoverished conditions currently affecting many American neighborhoods. Lack of economic opportunity coupled with an influx of drugs and weaponry is largely to blame for the degeneration of black gangs from liberation organizations into criminal enterprises largely controlled by external influences. This corruption can only be brought about via multinational investment and black marketeering. The genesis and utilities of this process goes largely unexplored and unexplained in public discourse. These processes have led to an inversion of gangs from their original purposes.
Contemporarily, gangs are typically viewed as criminal enterprises focused on subversion of community and good citizenship. This is largely due to skewed media portrayal and inaccurate urban myth. Media bias positing groups of urban youths as the major purveyors of violence in American society has made almost impossible any dissociation of gangs from the ill effects of drugs and gun violence in public perception. Hence, most any gathering of urban, especially black or Latino youth, outside of specific legitimized context, is implicitly vilified as riotous and potentially violent. This is problematic.
The point is that, while gangs may indeed be entrenched or mired in drug trafficking and gun violence, it is not their raison d’être (reason for being) and it does not define the limits of gangs’ possibilities as mitigators of positive social change or as purveyors of critical consciousnesses. This abstract represents for a call for “gang outreach” programs to have as their focus, not necessarily a lessening of gang membership (in the hope that a lessening in gang membership will necessarily equate to a lessening in violence), but a Gang Amelioration project aimed at purging them of drugs and guns, one member at a time, so that Young Black Liberation Organizations, currently called gangs, can serve their original sublimative, ameliorative, necessary, purposes. Can Community Youth Organizations be flipped from quasi criminal syndicates into Political Action Committees (PAC) and active voter blocks?
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