GANGS, POLITICS AND RAP MUSIC
By unknown author (If anyone knows the name of the author of this material please leave it in the comments)2,000 words
“Youth gangs around the world have had a complex and
shifting relationship to politics and social movements. While gang activity is
often a product of youthful alienation and lack of conventional opportunities,
gangs have at times been drawn into grass roots, nationalist, religious, and
revolutionary mass activity. Gangs have also played both political and paramilitary
roles in support of powerful elites, and have organized politically in defense
of the underground economy. Past experience with political activism
demonstrates that when social movements do not address the concerns of the most
socially excluded and marginalized, gangs will institutionalize and take
destructive forms. On the other hand, political movements that include the
interests of the socially excluded can gain the gangs’ support and have a
better chance of reducing local violence and advancing their aims.
There have been three distinct periods of youth gang political activity. The
earliest gangs were “primitive rebels,” Mafioso in Italy and Triads in China
who had their origins in resistance to foreign rule — the Spanish Habsburgs and
the Q’ing Dynasty. These Sicilian, Italian, and Chinese groups were not pure
social movements, but combined nationalist appeals with the pedaling of
protection and control of gambling, prostitution, and drugs.
In London, groups of “hooligans” were a sixteenth century by-product of
urbanization. During the 19thcentury Chartist rebellion, it was claimed that
hooligans of all sorts pitched in on the side of working class organizations.
However, it was the United States that developed the paradigmatic use of the
gang in local political affairs.
Immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Italy and other countries in the 1800s came to
U.S. cities and sparked periods of intense ethnic and class conflict. The
building of urban machines relied on ethnic politics and clashes between
immigrant groups were the norm in Boston, New York, and many cities.
In New York City, the dominant Yankees were challenged by the Irish who
mobilized “voting gangs” to intimidate rivals. Politicians to bully Tammany
Hall’s electoral opponents recruited corner kids, who gathered in loosely
organized groups. These second-generation children were attracted to gangs both
as an act of rebellion against their more traditional parents, but also in
ethnic solidarity.
Racism against African Americans and Mexicans has also been an undercurrent in
U.S. white ethnic gang life. In New York City, Irish gangs led the assaults on
African Americans during the Civil War “Draft Riots” and Klan activity helped
keep Los Angeles Mexicans politically quiescent in the early 20th
century as well as terrorize southern Blacks. The nadir of racist gang activity
was to occur in Chicago in the period after World War I.
Youth gang politics in Chicago, as in New York City and elsewhere, mainly
consisted of gang members acting like thugs on election day for the Democratic
Party. However, unlike other cities, ethnic gangs in Chicago were also part of
an on-going violent enforcement of a segregated, racial order. Chicago’s white
“social athletic clubs,” or gangs tied to the Democratic Party, were
responsible for the intensity and duration of the 1919 race riot that killed 38
people.
In Asia, gangs were political actors in several countries, tightly linked to
the heroin trade. For example, the Green Circle, a Chinese Triad, led the
slaughter of communists for Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 and were major allies of
the ruling Kuomintang. In the 1940s, the Binh Xuyen gang in Saigon became
politicized while serving time in prison with nationalists and communists — an
indication of things to come. Corsican gangs played a major role in South East
Asian heroin trafficking and worked with French military and intelligence
organizations.
Gang involvement with politics, however, would change abruptly with the
worldwide upsurge of the 1960s.Oppressed peoples around the world mobilized as
part of national liberation and revolutionary struggles. In South Africa, youth
gangs in Soweto and other cities joined with the ANC and PAC in mass
demonstrations and opposition to the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela
explicitly called on the ANC to win over the gangs to the cause of liberation.
As political alternatives appeared more promising, the alienation of poor youth
was channeled into political parties, as in Northern Ireland and New Zealand.
Gangs, as organizations of the street, typically stayed active in the
underground economy. Revolutionary movements, from Uruguay’s Tupamaros to the
Irish Republican Army, adopted bank robbery, extortion, and other gang tactics.
This dual character of youth gangs can be most clearly seen in the U.S. In
Chicago, the Conservative Vice Lords, the Blackstone Rangers, and the Black
Gangster Disciples began to organize multi-neighborhood branches at the end of
the 1950s. White ethnics had resisted Black residential mobility and white and
black gangs fought continually in schools and on corners. Black gangs were
involved in both petty hustling but were also drawn to the emerging civil
rights movement.
By the late 1960s, all Chicago’s major Black gangs had become involved in running
social programs, starting businesses, and dabbling in local politics. When
Martin Luther King came to Chicago in 1966, he moved into an apartment in
Lawndale, home of the Vice Lords, met with them, and encouraged their
involvement in his housing campaign. The three major Black gangs formed a
coalition, “LSD,” standing for “Lords, Stones, Disciples” and took part in the
struggle for jobs in the construction of buildings of the University of
Illinois-Chicago. The three gangs met regularly with Fred Hampton, leader of
the Illinois Black Panther Party and discussed how to mobilize the most
disadvantaged sectors of the Black community.
Puerto Rican and Mexican gangs also were pulled into politics. The Young Lords
were a Chicago Puerto Rican street gang that became politicized during the same
time. They also allied with the Black Panther Party and encouraged Young Lord
chapters to be formed across the US, notably in New York City. Chicano and
Mexican-American gang members also took part in the Brown Berets and other left
wing political movements. In Los Angeles, Crips and Bloods also engaged in
radical politics as did the Savage Nomads, the Ghetto Brothers, and other New
York City gangs.
There were constant tensions between the gangs and revolutionary organizations.
The Black Panthers were recruiting from the same youthful, mainly male,
populations as the gangs. The US government, through programs such as the now
infamous COINTELPRO, provoked conflict between the gangs and revolutionaries,
in some cases resulting in gun battles.
The involvement of gangs in politics in the 1960s was curtailed by repression
that forcibly transferred the gangs from the streets to the prison. While
President Nixon declared “war on crime,” in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley declared
his own “war” on gangs. Daley acted after the Blackstone Rangers organized a
successful boycott of the 1968 presidential elections, costing the Democrat,
Hubert H. Humphrey, Illinois’ crucial votes and throwing the national election
to Richard Nixon.
Incarcerating gangs and revolutionaries together occurred in many countries
often had the effect of destroying the political organizations while providing
the gangs with useful organizational advice. In Brazil, the policy of putting
all bank robbers together, criminals and revolutionaries had the unintended
effect of organizing Rio de Janiero’s armed drug factions. In the US,
revolutionary nationalism among Black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican inmates gave
shape to a more business-oriented style of gang organization and parallel
ethnic prison gangs.
Throughout the world, the decisive defeat of most left wing political movements
shattered hopes of progress in the ghettoes, barrios, and favelas and gave
priority to an ideology of “survival.” The defeat of the revolutionary
movements in the 1960s and 1970s led to more cynical, alienated, and
de-politicized gangs. This demoralization, the emergence of the drug cartels,
the fall of the Soviet Union, and the overwhelming power of global corporations
would shape the political involvement of gangs at the end of the millennium.
Gangs, as organizations of the street and participants in the drug economy,
play an important political role in the global era. Nation-states throughout
the world have been weakened as multi-national corporations move vast sums of
money at the click of a mouse, destabilizing entire countries and regions. The
demise of the USSR meant that countries could no longer play one superpower off
against another. Aid from western countries and the World Bank often is
predicated on cutting domestic social spending in countries with desperately
poor populations. At the same time, the enormous profits of the drug economy
made the powerful Colombian and Mexican cartels major political players.
Working for the traffickers is often the only well-paid employment for young
men in barrios, ghettoes, and favelas.
All these factors led to a strengthening of non-state actors, among them gangs,
who often exercise effective social control over urban and rural territories of
weakened states. The uncertainties of globalization also sparked a crisis in
identity. More traditional notions of religion and race replaced secular and
revolutionary identities. “Gangsta rap” music, based on gang life in American
ghettoes, became an influential force among youth globally
Political activity by gangs took three forms at the end of the 20th
century. First, in countries like Jamaica, the political parties recruited
gangs to help them gain or hold on to power. Very much like the US voting gangs
of a century before, these gangs engaged in violence at the behest of
politicians. This also meant de facto protection of their criminal activity,
especially the drug trade. Throughout South America, gangs were recruited by
the traffickers for protection of their interests, and often to support one
political faction against another. There are now thousands of children in
organized armed violence, some child soldiers, in South America, Africa, and
Asia. Death squads, drug cartels, revolutionary groups, and the military all
recruit from the same pool of poor, angry young men who are attracted to gangs.
In Mumbai (Bombay), India, the Shiv Sena, a militant, fundamentalist Hindu
party, came to power through a shrewd mixture of “hinduvata” or appeals to
Hindu dominance, and use of “dada,” or gangs to provide electoral and
anti-Muslim violence. In Nigeria, gangs were organized by some states with
Muslim majorities enforce Sharia, or Muslim law. At the same time, in gangland
tradition, they supported themselves through the drug economy.
A second form of political activity was the devolution of some nationalist or
revolutionary groups into gangs. In Northern Ireland, Protestant militias, once
violent Catholic-killers, began to lose heart as the peace process and Catholic
birth rate accelerated. Violence in Belfast today is not mainly between
Protestants and Catholics, but overwhelmingly between former Protestant
militias fighting over local drug markets.
In South Africa, the “Spear of the Nation” armed warriors returning home after
Liberation were faced with stark alternatives. Having little education and few
skills other than armed struggle, a handful of these ex-revolutionaries got
jobs as police officers. The others had to choose between starvation and
working for the drug gangs. In South America, guerrilla groups such as FARC in
Colombia and Shining Path in Peru tax and cooperate with the traffickers to
fund their armed struggle.
In Eastern Europe, the demise of the Soviet Union brought the underground
economy out into the open. As socialism’s safety net unraveled, young men were
recruited into drug organizations and mafias. In Albania, the World Bank
reports, one quarter of all the young men are now employed in the drug economy.
In Yugoslavia, Serbian leaders used gangs to precede their army into Bosnia on
the grisly road to “ethnic cleansing.”
Finally, a few gangs were drawn into grass roots movements, mainly based on
racial or religious identity. In New York City, the Puerto Rican and Dominican
Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation attempted to transform itself from a
street gang into a community organization. Fierce repression and the jailing of
the political leadership met their short-lived attempt. In Chicago, gangs
participated in electoral politics both openly and behind the scenes. In Los
Angeles, Crips and Bloods put forth a sweeping program for economic reform
after the Rodney King riots. Muslim gangs in Africa and South Asia worked to
advance the influence of Muslim law over their populations, while maintaining
ties to the underground economy. All political factions in armed and
non-violent roles have recruited gangs in South America.
Gangs today are drawn into political activity under many different
circumstances. The power of globalization and weakness of the nation-state
guarantees a continuing role of gangs in political activity. As organizations
of the most marginalized populations, they mobilize in support of their
perceived interests. Often this includes defense of the underground economy,
but it can take on many political hues.
Contemporary gangs have strong ethnic and/or religious identities. Their
political agendas often coincide with those of their ethno-religious group.
When their group is in power, gangs can be used as shock troops in repression.
When street organizations are drawn from oppressed or marginalized national or
religious groups, they can engage in a politics of opposition. Lack of hope in
the future, however, often means gangs cynically manipulate politicians in the
interests of “survival,” a euphemism for the underground economy. These
different orientations are often represented in hip-hop music and culture,
which has spread from the U.S. to urban settings worldwide.
It is this aspect of gangs that makes them so important for political activism
of the 21st century. Where social movements provide hope for those
on the streets, gang organization can be won over to political activism.”