Culture of the condemned: a critique of how death row became a symbol of heroism for America's street-gang generation

Abstract

This is a nearly twenty-year immersive ethnographic PhD project that studied the street culture of the Crips and Bloods youth gangs in California, labeled here as the ‘culture of the condemned’. I argue that the racialized history of four-hundred years in the United States has shaped today’s urban killing culture among what I have titled the ‘black gangster class’. This doctoral project examines that racialized history by tracking three conceptual strands — duality, agency, and freedom — to understand the evolution of certain survival-inspired character adaptations of black male street gangsters. Those character adaptations are threefold. First, a black gangster experiences a duality of consciousness influenced from functioning as both the racially oppressed prey whose life is always in jeopardy and as the predator, a violent ruler of the streets, whose mirror image is that of his racialized oppressor now and in the past. Second, the black gangster class uses ‘inventive agency’ (my phrase) to reframe-by-mythologizing harsh circumstances — derived from racialized policy, such as the targeting of black men for mass incarceration — into iconic-status opportunities, given urban America’s street codes. Third, these gangsters crave freedom to make their own rules — even if momentary to claim symbolic freedom — secured at nearly any cost, such as the murdering of others, as well as risking their own safety and imprisonment. It is within such a context that this study affords an alternative understanding of the violence performed by black gang members. My contention is that becoming a murderer in the world of the black gangster class has attained a new and significant purpose: that of serving as a legitimate, culturally normalized ‘occupation’ leading to an upwardly mobile gangster career path. With this culture of the condemned, murdered bodies are categorized as a type of ‘currency’ earned by the gangsters who have killed them. Committing murder, then, is considered a rational strategy for accumulating reputational wealth. In this culture, prisons are reimagined by black gangsters to become gladiator schools where gang members get to transform into men by surviving the daily life-threatening environment of incarceration. Further, for some street gangsters, death row is a desired outcome because it can lead to a greater legendary status. Since prisons are dubbed gladiator schools where street gangsters go to become men, death row is where they go to become supermen because of the more dramatically violent circumstances required to be charged with a capital offense. That extra drama enhances the street-mythic standing of the black gangster. My theoretical framework for this doctoral project is Critical Race Theory (CRT) with support from Michel Foucault’s analytic approach to contextualizing history. The primary aim of this study is to introduce a new starting point — the culture of the condemned — for the academy and policymakers to evaluate America’s street-gang generation. My contention is that inquiries into the world of black street gangsterism need to be engaged and guided by the gangster-class perspective itself. Here I argue that maintaining a racialized episteme among America’s white ruling class that profoundly misunderstands and thus miscasts the black gangster class has led to an unthinkable outcome: support for and implementation of a death-penalty policy that incentivizes murder among street gangsters rather than serves as a deterrent to killing. This study also has an objective of encouraging gangsters to examine, critically, the origins and evolution of their own street ‘habitus,’ a Pierre Bourdieu concept otherwise known as customs, practices, habits that can culturally valorize behavior. Such self-interrogation could help street gangsters determine how to construct a new way forward for themselves and their communities — or not. It, as always, is their choice.

This project has also relied on three currently imprisoned gangsters, two Crips and one member of the Bloods, who are serving as co-researchers. They have read my chapters to provide feedback for reflexivity, given the significant differences in my middle-class upbringing and their street-culture existence, and validation of my theorizing about their lives and culture.