Part III: Historical Context
In addition to the ethnographic and theoretical components of this unit, it is imperative to provide students with historical context. My students will have already taken United States History as 10th graders, but they will need a review and some nudges for how to draw connections between the past and the ethnographic present. This is a summary of some pivotal trends that led predominantly African American urban neighborhoods like Eastwood to face the challenges of unemployment, drug addiction, and violence that they too often face today.
Housing Discrimination
In the first half of the 20th century, the daily hardships of living under the Jim Crow regime, as well as the growing pull of industrial jobs, led six million African Americans to migrate from the South to the North and West. They flocked to cities like Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago. When they arrived, they found many new freedoms and privileges, but equal and quality housing was rarely one of them.19 Through discriminatory government policies and practices such as redlining and mortgage discrimination, black residents were denied the ability to rent or purchase homes in white neighborhoods, forcing even middle and upper class African Americans into often sub-par housing in concentrated neighborhoods.20 This limited many families’ access to economic opportunities in other parts of the city and prevented them from building wealth through home equity, all at a time when white Americans were acquiring massive wealth through federally subsidized mortgages.21
Following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, many white city residents participated in “white flight” by moving to the suburbs. This further concentrated the residential segregation of America’s cities and, because of racist presumptions of who “deserved” government support, led to systematic disinvestment in city infrastructure and services. “The structural conditions established by 20th century federal policy endure to this day” in urban neighborhoods like Eastwood, where decades of disinvestment and lack of economic opportunity have led to a high concentration of African Americans living in poverty.22
History of Gangs in the United States
This history of disinvestment in urban non-white communities is paralleled by the history of gangs. Gangs first arose on the east coast soon after the American Revolution: they have been a feature of American society since the founding of our nation, but their shape and role has shifted over time.23 In Chicago, the location of Eastwood, and thus the focus of this section, gangs emerged during industrialization in the late 19th century.24 Gangs formed along ethnic lines, among Irish, Polish, Italians and other European immigrant groups.25 These were the same groups that were marginalized and racialized as non-white at the time.
The first significant African American gangs were formed during the 1919 Chicago Race Riot in which “Black males united to confront hostile White gang members who were terrorizing the Black community.”26 This incident of racial violence, as well as the growth of African American gangs in Chicago, mirrors the impact of the Great Migration as it changed the demographics of the Windy City. During this same time, Mexican American gangs formed in Chicago as migration from Mexico increased. These two groups are most publicized in the media today as involved with gangs, because, as Shelden, Tracy, and Brown argue in their book Youth Gangs in American Society, they are currently the “ethnic minority groups that the dominant social class has perceived to be more threatening to social stability.”27 In understanding and teaching about gangs, it is imperative to disentangle the racist stereotypes of Black and Latino gang violence from the realities on the ground.
The global drug trade, while in existence at least since the 19th century, experienced changes in flow, availability, and demand in the late twentieth century, leading gangs in Chicago to become increasingly involved with the drug trade. This was often associated with increased violence.28 Shelden, Tracy, and Brown contend that increased gang involvement with the drug trade is part of the expansion of unregulated capitalism and entrepreneurial values.29 The 1970s and 80s, when this trade increased, was the same period in which there were decreasing opportunities for employment in America's cities, as deindustrialization began. This lack of economic opportunity has led more gang members to remain with the gang into adulthood.30 However, we see in Renegade Dreams that adult gang members have many reasons for retaining their affiliation, from Mr. Otis’s pride in being a part of the gang’s history to Kemo’s desire for profit and a role in his community. Ethnography provides a window into how gang membership is a result of social relationships and sense of belonging, as well as economic imperatives.
The War on Drugs
In June 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” and soon after increased the role of federal drug agencies and increased the criminal consequences for using and selling illegal drugs.31 John Ehrlichman, a member of the Nixon administration, later admitted:
“You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”32
Thus, the War on Drugs, in the opinion of its own strategists, was a racist effort, and as intended, it has had outsize effects on African Americans. Over the past few decades, black Americans have received drug convictions and sentences far disproportionate to drug usage and their presence in the population; in fact, 5% of illicit drug users are African American, yet African Americans represent 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offenses.33 These disproportionate effects of the drug war on African Americans have led, in part, to the mass incarceration that we see today. The number of people incarcerated rose from roughly 500,000 to 2.2 million between 1980 and 2015, and African Americans are incarcerated at a rate 5 times higher than whites.34 It is important to also note that mass incarceration does not just affect people who are imprisoned, but their families and communities—like those in Eastwood.
The effects of the war on drugs are wildly disproportionate and unhelpful to those who need support with addiction or employment, but it is true that many people in Eastwood struggle with drug use. An epidemiological study of inner city neighborhoods found that first, African-Americans living in six central cities had “low lifetime rates of illicit drug use”; second, there were “higher rates of use of illicit drugs in the past year than the national sample, especially those still living in areas with high rates of poverty”; and third, “reports of heavy drug trafficking were much greater in the inner city areas than in the suburbs.”35 In short, the drug problem in predominantly black, urban communities is both very real and very overblown in the media.
The third finding of that study is reflected in Renegade Dreams. In Eastwood, the Divine Knights gang was originally more of a civil rights and community service organization, but it entered the drug market in the 1980s and 90s. This had appeal in a community where other economic and educational opportunities were limited. The drug trade, with its accompanying problems of addiction, violence, and incarceration, serves as a backdrop to the ethnography. Thus, I believe it is essential that students understand these historical nuances regarding the war on drugs and drug dealing. They need to know about these realities, without perpetuating racist stereotypes and assumptions of criminality that create so much harm.
Politics of Respectability
A major theme in Renegade Dreams is the contestation of who is deemed a good guy versus a troublemaker causing the violence in Eastwood. Gang unaffiliated residents blame the gang, older gang members blame younger gang members, and younger gang members blame other gangs. These various people compete to claim who has a right to speak on behalf of the neighborhood. I want to briefly note the connection between this contestation and the long history of a “politics of respectability” in black communities. This politics of respectability demarcates who is considered “respectable,” or included in the social mainstream.
It originates, in part, from a 19th century civil rights strategy promoted by leaders like Booker T. Washington. Washington argued that if African Americans demonstrated that they were morally, economically, and socially respectable as individuals, it would lead to great rights. Meanwhile, W.E.B. Du Bois promoted the idea of a “talented tenth” of black Americans who would lead the civil rights movement. These ideas, as well as the lived reality for black Americans that they could face criminalization or death if perceived as a troublemaker, led to a politics of respectability. The legacy of this, and shades of it, continue to today. It may be important to provide this historical context to students to help them understand the roots of the internal disagreements among black people in Eastwood.
Anthropology and Racism
In discussing the history of racist policies in the United States, it is essential to also note the role that the discipline of anthropology has played in promoting racism. Some late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists classified human skulls by race and ethnographers divided people into strata of “civilized” and “primitive,” categories of social exclusion rooted in racism. This “research” contributed to the eugenics movement and the racist biological arguments made by proponents of segregation. While some early anthropologists, such as Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, pushed back against theories of cultural or racial superiority, most early anthropology is laden with racist assumptions about who is included in “civilization” or “society.” In fact, the delineation between sociology and anthropology can trace its roots to these assumptions; sociologists studied “civilized” (code: white) societies, while anthropologists studied “primitive” (code: non-white) societies. Any discussion of ethnography and race requires us to acknowledge and honor this fraught history. We must teach students to question the discipline, even as we teach them its value.
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