Another day, another shooting
rampage. As I write this, folks are recoiling in horror from a school shooting
in suburban Los Angeles. But the public anguish won’t last long: these
shootings have become so commonplace that no one pays more than momentary attention,
even though what was once an inner-city gang phenomenon has evolved into
long-wolf attacks in the suburbs. How did this happen, and why? I’m sure Léon
Bing has an opinion.
Léon Bing is full of
surprises. First of all, she’s female. As a top fashion model—someone who posed
on the cover of Time magazine in a Vidal Sassoon haircut and a
micro-mini designed by Rudi Gernreich—she should have retired to a life in some
opulent penthouse. Instead, Bing turned to journalism, and her first published
book was a 1991 best-seller. Called Do or Die, it’s an inside look at
life in L.A.’s most notorious street gangs. With courage and no lack of
chutzpah, Bing went out and befriended members of the Crips and the Bloods,
visiting them in their homes, on their streets, and in prison. Her no-bullshit
first-person account of their conversations reveals what poverty, aimlessness,
and a desperate need for belonging can do to young men (and women) of color.
It’s a solid little book: frank, instructive, and more than a bit frightening.
The gang members about whom
Bing writes, though certainly picturesque, do not leap and pirouette down city
streets à la West Side Story. They’re tough customers who skip school, deal
dope, steal cars, and wreak bloody revenge on their numerous enemies. They also
adhere to strict codes of behavior that govern all their interactions with
others. They know full well that a
simple transgression like walking down the wrong street or wearing the wrong
colors can mean death, and that their families are hardly immune from payback.
One thing I picked up from Do
or Die is the impact of movies on gang behavior. A young Crip named G-Roc lectured
Bing on the impact of a 1988 Hollywood film called Colors, directed by
Dennis Hopper and starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. Colors has been
described this way: “An experienced cop and his rookie partner patrol the
streets of East Los Angeles while trying to keep the gang violence under
control.” In G-Roc’s terms (and I apologize for his language choices), Colors
was an incitement to violence among the young gangsters it intended to
portray: “Lemme tell you, girl, that was some dangerous shit in that movie.
That shit just fired niggers up. Niggers saw that shit, they went out there
just straight for the kill. You know, like no mercy whatsoever for
anybody. That shit was just a green light to kill or be killed.” And why was Colors
such a motivator? Because gang members found it fake, and were determined to
show what real gang behavior was all about.
Late in her book, Bing
recounts her visit to Monster Kody in Soledad Prison. Kody has been away from
the streets long enough to become a kind of philosopher, sorting through the
attractions of gangbanging: “It’s a dashing, exciting game of cat and mouse
with your own life . . . You do things
you’ve seen other people do. You try to get out of your car like Warren Beatty
did in Bonnie and Clyde.” When you
shoot someone, “it all becomes scenes from movies—you’re doin’ James Cagney and
Edward G. Robinson.” So gangbangers in
their own way become movie stars. And star-power, alas, now seems to be
motivating other young people to seal their reputations through violence.
No comments:
Post a Comment