7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What is a gang?, February 3, 2010
This review is from: Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets (Alternative Criminology) (Paperback)
A group of violent thugs? A social club? Troubled, homeless losers who are "hard to love"?
And what is gang membership? Is it a fixed identity, or something fluid, which urban youngsters claim or don't claim according to external circumstances and the flow of their lives?
How can we explain why, even in the roughest neighborhoods, at most 10% of youths belong to street gangs? Who are the other nine out of ten, and how do they negotiate survival without affiliation?
Robert Garot, now an assistant sociology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is ideally situated to take a stab at these difficult questions. For four years while he was in college, he volunteered off and on at an inner-city continuation school in Southern California. Conducting ethnographic interviews with 46 students, he explored how the youths themselves chose to position themselves in relation to the local gangs, and to violence and street life more generally.
In the course of research, he came to believe that superficial anti-gang pogroms, in which schools ban certain colors and styles, do nothing to improve safety or reduce the influence of gangs. Indeed, they may paradoxically increase gangs' allure as a means of resistance against a "counterfeit," alienating educational bureaucracy intent on stifling their creativity and hope.
Garot sets himself apart from the pathologizing lens through which most criminology researchers -- due in part to funding structures that favor the status quo -- approach gangs. Instead, he views gangs as one of many ways for youths to "stylistically remake the world," a tool that some youths in impoverished environments bend to their needs and then discard when no longer useful. This nuanced lens would give more credibility to anti-gang violence campaigns, by acknowledging the mixed, sometimes-positive role gangs can play in communities where official neglect has created a vacuum.
Although Garot backs into his material, getting off to a slow start by reciting dry academic theory, he hits his stride when presenting his observations and case studies. Particularly interesting are his first-hand observations, rare in academic discourse, of fights, and his analyses of the complexities surrounding such street rituals as "hitting up" (demanding to know someone's affiliation) and "ranking out" (claiming no gang), which young people in this community had to master in order to survive.
The essential message: Beware of reifying gangs as fixed and essential components of identity, when even their members do not see them as such. As urban centers create increasingly fluid and multi-faceted possibilities for identity -- witness cuisines such as Polish-Brazilian and Mexican-Korean -- identity is becoming much more malleable and flexible than a narrow, unidimensional, and pejorative focus would lead us to believe.
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1 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Reality!, February 18, 2010
This review is from: Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets (Alternative Criminology) (Paperback)
This book is written by a professor and that is exactly what you get, a bunch of academic intellectual "hogwash". This so-called expert went into his project with a bias and that was all he did the entire book was prove his own bias on Gangs. I got this book hoping it could help with "stopping" or "preventing" gangs in school because I work as a school resource police officer; however, this book is nothing but a bash fest on any gang enforcement or gang prevention. I felt as though he was almost "glorifying" gangs. There are no comments from any school security officers, police officers, gang detectives, probation officers, or corrections officers anywhere in this book! I think "the professor" needs to get out of the classroom, ride with a law enforcement gang unit, and see that "colors" get you killed in the real world! Being a so-called "wanna be" will also get you killed in the real world! It is easy to say such happy go lucky things about gangs when you don't have to clean up their dead bodies or tell their mother's they were killed because they CAME TO SCHOOL WEARING THE WRONG COLOR!!
Save your money and pass on this book.
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