Gangs Facilitating Commerce and Culture

I am a normal looking, clean cut, white male from the burbs of Chicago. Like, definitely the burbs, like I shouldn’t technically feel right telling people I’m from Chicago while traveling or otherwise. My family resides in a nice middle class home in a lovely neighborhood, my father works hard and makes a great living and has been able to support my mother, brother, and me since this family started. Under my designation as such, a white man in this very advantaged environment, privilege is something that has always been a part of my life, but something that I don’t realize all too often.

There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz, really brings to light some of the things that I couldn’t possibly grasp as reality having lived in the fashion that I have for my whole life. There were many things about living that had me convinced that that’s just the way it is, but in a reverse to Tupac’s version. In this version, I thought everyone could really stand a chance at living this very well-off life, and that that belief was irrefutable. However, I was wrong ok! And one thing that forms a large separation between what I have come to know in my privileged life and the disadvantaged life of urban black communities is the presence of gangs to make up for circumstantial shortcomings.

In the burbs where I have lived and grown up in, I have been able to find work without any bit of a problem, whether it is simple kid work or the chance to move up into managerial positions, I had that opportunity. In There Are No Children Here, people are living in an impoverished area where they don’t have much of a chance for upward mobility. With such little opportunity, young adults and even children would begin to integrate themselves into the gangs as a means of finding work. Jimmie Lee’s production alone was able to generate tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of profit each week. In a similar case to much of what we have assessed in terms of poverty over the course of this semester, people acted out of necessity and did what they had to in order to survive given the lack of options otherwise. In a course that I had taken on criminology in previous semesters, the notion of innovation was brought up, and that was what came to mind through much of this reading. In an attempt to make a solid living, people within the area surrounding the Henry Horner Homes had to innovate new methods in order to sustain themselves and keep a living. However ways that fall within this innovative schema are typically through criminality, as this was the case for the gangs that would sell drugs or commit theft in order to make that living.

Aside from just a way to make a living, institutions take on a different persona with respect to these black urban populations like those in the text as well. I had a recent experience where my brother and I were stopped by an officer for apparently following the car in front of us a little too closely. Before we knew it, our whole car was being searched (I promise, I’m clean, a beer or two or three is the limit for me) thoroughly multiple times. It was the first time that I ever really felt like the law wasn’t on my side, or there to protect me, for the first time, it felt like an officer was just fishing for ill intent on my part even. Appropriately enough, I found this intriguing in comparison to the reality of what happened in There Are no Children Here. The notion of police as a protective and service institution had failed. The police had treated urban black populations as an enemy to the point that the urban black community had to form its own system of protection. That protection was found in gangs, as they were seen as such by the people of the community. Where the law fell short of helping their situation, the gangs made up for it.

So in essence, the gangs of this area served as industry in order to generate some sort of money to make a living and protection and law enforcement since the law enforcement institution was not providing these means. A sort of counter culture is formed out of necessity based on the primary culture of the privileged. I have spoken often on the notion that black urban disadvantage stems from perceptions of culture on them as being a culture of poverty, and I will add further to that argument that gangs form out of necessity in this respect.