“As Soon as I Get Out Ima Cop Dem Jordans”: The Afterlife of the Corporate Gang

Abstract

Sudhir Venkatesh and Steven Levitt's influential 2000 article transformed the way social scientists study gangs by showing the context in which Chicago gang members built an organization modeled on a corporation. But if this research helped to demonstrate that the underground economy is a logical response to the inner city's isolation from the rest of the country, it also makes it difficult to see that the very same factors that have led to urban decay and “social isolation” (i.e., escalating unemployment, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the emergence of gangs to fill bureaucratic voids) serve to connect gangs to wider social worlds. This study expands upon recent gang research by detailing the improvisational economic and social practices, as well as the intricate narratives, and the social practices that allow Chicago gangs and their members to access a variety of people, institutions, and resources, while marking the diverse modes of historical consciousness that gang affiliates develop. A gang that I will here be calling the “Divine Aces” forms a powerful case in point.¹

Keywords:

• historical consciousness
• gangs
• urban youth
• war on drugs
• style
• civil rights

I thank Gilberto Rosas for inviting me to participate in the “New Frontiers of Race” conference at the University of Chicago. The valuable commentary I received at this conference helped me refine the argument for this article. I also received critical feedback on this article from the brilliant faculty and students at Williams College, where the Africana Studies Program invited me to give a guest lecture. I also thank Larry McEnerney, for allowing me to present a draft of this paper in his class “Writing a Publishable Paper” at the University of Chicago. Jason Ruiz, Heidi Ardizzone, Dianne Pinderhughes, Richard Pierce, Denise Challenger, Jessica Graham, Marques Redd, Jean Beaman, Nicole Ivy, and James Ford offered their insights on portions of this manuscript during my stay at the University of Notre Dame as an Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellow. I owe you all a great deal of gratitude. I recognize the participants of the “Cool PhD Club Retreat”: Michael Ralph Jr., Eva Haldane, Megan Francis, Uri McMillan, and Leah Wright. I appreciate all of your hard work on my behalf. This essay also benefited from a talented cadre of advisors, friends, and family members who were kind enough to read and offer commentary on this paper: John L. Comaroff, Stephan Palmié, Michael Silverstein, Joseph Masco, Karla Slocum, Jonathan Rosa, Christine Nutter, Lily Chumley, Marina Mikhaylova, Theodore Francis, Michael Ralph Sr., and Lynette Lawrence Ralph. You make me a better scholar and person. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Your careful scrutiny helped bring this article to life.

Notes

1. In accordance with the Internal Review Board protocol for the University of Chicago, I have changed the names of people, gangs, and specific neighborhoods throughout this study.

2. Wilson's approach can be placed within a larger genealogy of research associated with the “Chicago School” of Sociology. Instead of defining the gang problem as primarily a criminal one, many early sociologists tried to analyze what had “gone amiss” and fostered slums. This notion was embraced most notably by Frederic Thrasher, author of the classic The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago ([1927] 1963).

3. Similarly, Carl Nightingale has argued that the values of the American Dream permeate all levels of United States society. He contends that the greatest dilemma for urban youth is not oppositional culture, but their strong commitment to the tenets of the American Dream (1993: 56).

4. This approach is similar to Renato Rosaldo's conception in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989). While problematizing the emphasis on structure in classical ethnography, Rosaldo notes that many ethnographies are unable to account for the open-ended human processes in the informal settings of everyday life that occur outside a circumscribed sphere of social life. Because culture is an open and “porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders,” Rosaldo argues for a focus on the intersections of “cultural borderlands” (1989: 20).

5. Following Hebdige's analysis of youth culture through sartorial style (1979), I build on the work of scholars who have examined contemporary African American “style,” in particular. For example, Mary Pattillo-McCoy has argued that in the 1980s, when advertisers began targeting black youths through an “increased use of black models, celebrities, and cultural themes,” material goods were used as status markers and symbols of black identity (1999: 147–148). Moreover, Pattillo-McCoy discusses how Nikes—and the aesthetic enjoyment derived from purchasing them—played a role in how young, black Chicagoans thought about courtship, self-esteem, and gang affiliation (1999: 146–150).

6. I mention ghosts here to reference the historicized reality that Walter Benjamin convincingly captured when he argued that “haunting” occurs when “an occluded dimension of the past becomes visible through a form of recognition that seizes on its fleeting image before it sinks into irretrievable oblivion” (1978: 257, quoted in Palmié 2002: 11).

7. Speaking of the perspectives of gang members like Mr. Otis, Tom Hayden similarly argues that the “failure of radicalism bred nihilism” for some of America's most notorious street gangs (2004: 167).

8. Marc Mauer (2006: 93) has pointed out that no one knows the extent to which crime rates actually increased. One of the ironies of the period is that the growing politicization of crime itself contributed to higher reporting rates.

9. See Campbell's discussion of patches for another detailed ethnographic example of the way in which “style” signals affiliation and solidifies social bonds (1984: 52–54 and 89).

10. In Eastwood, 70 percent of the population never finished high school. Tom Hayden has noted that the dropout rate in inner-city schools is both a measurement and a major cause of gang involvement. “Abandoning or being driven out of school,” he argues, “is a definitive moment after which a gang identity becomes more important” (2004: 311).

11. See also Scott H. Decker et al. for the role of parental and sibling gang affiliation in motivating membership (1996: 232).

12. In the song “On to the Next One,” from his 2009 album, The Blueprint 3, Jay-Z raps, “…Obama on the text, y'all should be afraid of what I'm gonna do next.”