I have only listened to the first hour of the very
interesting This American Life episode exploring the life at Harper High School
in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago so far, but feel that the
episode provides a very interesting picture of the aftermath of a disruption of
a massive gang culture. If you have not heard the episode, David Carr, on the
New York Times Media Decoder blog, has a good summary: ‘This
American Life’ Looks at a High School Marooned in Violence.
It seems that the gangs were, in fact, dismantled by the
targeted removal by the police of the noted gang leaders. Other individuals did not step
into the place of those removed, at least not in a way that mimicked the former
organization. The disruption of the traditional turf by public housing
demolitions may have also contributed to the change. But now that the old gangs
are gone, what do we have instead? With the removal of the large organizations,
we have the emergence of many small organizations. And the small organizations
are as much or more of a danger than the original.
But why? Why must there be gangs at all? Why did breaking up
the gangs not result in no gangs? Why was there a vacuum? Gangs don’t exist
everywhere, why must they exist in Chicago?
To attempt to understand this, I think we need to know what
gangs do. In part, they sell drugs, and if that demand still exists, it makes
sense that another seller emerges. But
selling drugs is not the primary function of the gangs discussed in the TAL
story. Gangs also establish a sense of order and belonging. And this is the
important aspect of gangs we must understand more. It wasn’t a marketplace
without a seller that caused the emergence of many little gangs in this
neighborhood in Chicago, it was the lack of a sense of order and belonging that
was left once the hierarchy of the former gangs was gutted.
But the need for order and belonging cannot be unique to
teenagers in Chicago’s inner city. So, where does it come from in other places?
Let’s start with belonging. Teenagers across the country struggle with
developing a sense of belonging. And they establish gangs, but they are not
necessarily called gangs in other locations. In other locations they don’t have
guns. They are called cliques, groups, or something else, or they don’t have a
specific name, but they still allow some teenagers to establish superiority
over others. The reason gangs are a problem in Chicago schools is, in part, the
reason bullying is a problem elsewhere.
Is it just guns that make the difference between a gang and
a clique? The gangs described at Harper High School are still different than
the cliques that were present at my suburban high school (or, more accurately,
my junior high, where I actually had problems with cliques and bullying). The
cliques I navigated around were mostly limited to school itself. I could get
away from them by going home. After graduation, the cliques mostly disappeared
as well as the graduating seniors either left town for jobs or college, or were
busy with jobs and kids and life.
These are the major differences between gangs and cliques,
besides guns. Gangs exist outside of school, both while the teenagers are still
in school, and after graduation. And this is because gangs do not just
establish belonging, as cliques do, but establish order and control.
The gangs are the way these kids get some control over their chaotic
world. The more chaotic the world, the more they need a way to control it. I
didn’t need a way to control my world in the same way as a teenager. The adults
were ultimately in control. This is why the clique problems did not follow me
home, except in my own thoughts and worries. Even in class, the cliques were
less of an issue. It was primarily a lunchtime and passing period phenomenon. It is clear from the stories told on the TAL episode that the staff at Harper High School are working as hard as they can to keep the kids safe. But they are not in
control after school, and it may be that no one is. Some of the parents surely
work very hard to keep their kids out of the mess, but others may not. And this
is a community problem, not an individual problem. The problem is too big for
the adults trying to fix it to actually gain control. Thus, no one is really in
charge but the gangs, which are not only establishing belonging, but a sense of
order.
To fix the gang problem in Chicago, we
need to do more than just arrest all the gang leaders. We need the majority of
parents supporting their kids and establishing order in the lives of those
kids, which probably means we need drug treatment centers and a better
financial safety net for these parents. We need employment opportunities for
the teenagers that leave school. We need more good people like the teachers and
social workers and police at Harper High School working to make the lives of
these kids as “normal” as possible. And we need fewer guns in the hands of kids
that might shoot each other for normal teenage disputes. That is a lot to ask,
and it still may not be enough. Because we still don’t really know why there
are gang at Harper High School.
