Like a train wreck unfolding I could not draw myself away from the screening of Bastards of the Party on HBO last night. I'm sure I caught it very near the beginning. There are a lot of things to say and some interesting questions.
First of all my overall impression is that it was a very well done documentary which stitches together what would ordinarily sound incoherent into very much the narrative of bangers. Even though the story is more than a decade old, I can tell you without question that this is precisely the political position that those who knew and cared to defend the deeper meaning of LA black gangbanging put forward. That would include me to the extent that I cared back in 90-91.
Next I want to recount my first impression to mention of the show before I saw it. The thread was from Humiliation and Fortitude.
And then this:
The paramilitary angle of the LAPD is old news and history. Everybody who lives here understands the basic equation which is that the LA Metro area is understaffed wrt ratios of other big cities. We have a lower population density, and therefore cops are more reliant on transportation. IE there are no beat cops in LA and the entire concept of 'neighborhood policing' is fairly new - all since Rodney King.
That doesn't change the fact that streetgangs here kill more people than the entire Intifada. Already you've forgotten Tookie's reign of terror and are bloviating against cops, standard ignorant kneejerk position.
This 'distrubing militarization' has taken place in the context of the gangs who use real AK47s, not just the mythical ones rapped about in Gangsta. Remember this?
Here's a YouTube for you: http://tinyurl.com/yvn89x We lived in the city that had gun control for the cops and not for the gangs. We remember the days when cops couldn't even get 9mm weapons and how City Council debated it. LA is the city that invented the Drive By. We know.Again, I think it's rather pathetic that this third order Hollywood storyteller Fuqua has got your panties in a knot via his HBO special, but I lived there. He's writing a story off of the same kind of ridiculous hype that Mike Davis started two decades ago. Davis' doomsday hype is typical socialist fearmongering and foolishness. He has no idea about how to judge the dynamic and that's why he's been discredited.
Well, it turns out that Mike Davis' hand was very heavy in the historical narrative of Bastards. (Pun not necessarily intended). You can hear him drizzle down hazy associations directly on film. Davis is responsible for the reification of the term 'southcentral' which became something of a household word in the national dialog about black on black violence. And this film accurately acknowledges that he is the primary shaper of the Left vision of the forces arrayed in the conspiracy to destroy black boys. In many ways, Davis is the political leader all the Crips and Bloods really missed.
What made Operation Hammer a tragic disgrace to the LAPD and did cause a rise in black antipathy for the police was that after all of the overtime and gang sweeps, they only netted a 3% booking rate. It was a massive catch and release program that touched many black families in LA. So what of the other 97%? They were obviously not criminals, and in that lies the perspective that the film doesn't show.
The strength of this film is that it captures all of the reasons and excuses bangers had to justify their brutal, short and impoverished existence. What it didn't show at all was the extent to which they lived in constant denial of the black people they lived among. Bastards gives the impression that after the fall of the Black Panther and US organizations, there was nobody at all anywhere to be found that could give them direction. That absent whatever fathers they had or didn't have, gangbangers had nobody in Los Angeles to lead them away from self-destruction. The fact is that they didn't want to be led away. They wanted to be who they were and they changed their names to prove it. They refused to answer to school, work, church, sports or politics. And quiet as its kept, bangers can't dance either.
You see gangbangers were everywhere in black communities when I grew up. A kid at my Catholic school driven by bravado and fear created the Gangsta Crips. Green bomber jackets from Sears Pico was the uniform. Every party had bangers, every park had bangers. Every concert, high school graduation and mall had Crips, Blackstones, Pirus, Family, Park Boys and finally Bloods all over the joint. They were always in contact with ordinary folks and rejected their values at every turn.
Where this film got personal was with the coverage of the US organization. They showed the cover of Life magazine with us Young Simbas marching on the cover. And of course this was the picture where they put the mean looking kid up front instead of me. I was too cool to walk around with a scowl. But anyway, they built up the idea that Bunchy Carter was the incarnation of God on Earth. I'm going to have to check with Pops on that score. And then they had Joe Hicks and Geronimo Pratt talking. I didn't realize that Hicks was with US. Very interesting. But the difference between US and the Panthers was clear, and you could easily see that the bangers preferred the Panthers. The Panthers wanted to buy guns and US wanted to put on plays - at least my father did. Although he wasn't a member of US, we hung around the same places. Clearly, if Karenga did want to impress the bangers, that could have been a clue as to where he went wrong even if the FBI was entrapping him and provoking conflict between the two organizations.
I thought it rather odd the way the narrator asserted the big gap after the dissolution of the Panthers and Karenga's US. Of course it's key to the story that you must believe that once those two organizations were gone, all of political black Los Angeles disappeared. That without some black power political street organization, the ruination of gang 'death-style' was inevitable. So this is where I got mad, because it was basically thugs mad that there weren't 'political thugs' to hang with. But the fact of the matter is that the politics went directly to college campuses. And since when wasn't the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements student movements? When thugs wanted to get involved.
You really can't have a liberation movement which is criminal, even when the cops and political establishment are bent on criminalizing the movement. There is nothing special about black Los Angelenos in that regard. We've always been human beings potential and human beings with potential are not inspired by thugs.
Many may cry for the homies who died, and some even more for Tookie who fried.
But this shameful history removes the mystery
Most of those fools never even tried. I mock all of them who would call that black pride.
At long last the narrator comes to the end of the story and realizes finally that the gang life is bullshit. That's all the wisdom there is. So if the film works as it should, you will see the tissue of revisionism championed and framed by the liberal white socialist, bleated and protested by manchild after manchild, weighted down with blood and sorrow, come to its inevitable conclusion. There was never anything worth dying for. Not like that.
What you never see or hear are all the blackfolks who were saying "I told you so" all along the way. But that's a story for another day.
Recent Comments