SOCI 250 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Raymond Washington, Scapegoating, Guerrilla Warfare
8 Jun 2018
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Lecture 16 (November 7th, 2017)
Movie Lecture – WILL BE ON THE FINAL
! Movie notes: “Crips and Bloods: Made in America” (2008)
•!War between Crips and Bloods
o!Been happening for the last 39 years
•!Over the past 20 years along, 20,000 deaths related to this war
•!“I was born in the hood, I was raised in the hood, and I will die in the hood – my destination
chose me” – gang member
•!In the southern portion are the richest cities and richest nations in America
•!The home of America 2 most affluent African American gangs: Crips and bloods
o!This conflict has taken 5 times as many lives as the conflict in Northern Ireland
o!South Los-Angeles – but life wasn’t always this way
•!3 friends, Ron, Bird, Kumasi grew up reaching for their piece of the American dream –
couldn’t get into scouts (because it was a white troop) when they were young, so they started
forming their own brotherhood: gangs
•!Black teenagers began forming their own brotherhood gangs
•!LA’s first modern African American gang: clubs
o!They didn’t call themselves gangs because that’s how the police identified them
o!Gang – something the city gave them, the “gangs” themselves didn’t call themselves
that
•!It gave them a sense of identity, of brotherhood, companionship
o!There’s a sense of family, acceptance, and a sense to get some power
•!The early gangs fought but it wasn’t about destroying someone it was mostly about
competition with one another
•!Young black men in this society were viewed as the most threatening dangerous figures
across the board, viewed as people who would commit crimes and the police would stop
them a lot of times for no reason. Cops would treat them as though they were enemies.
•!Chef William Parker ran the security department as a military service and so the cops were
treating these young black men as though they were enemies and in warfare
•!The L.A.P.D. duty was to make sure people were in the right neighborhood at all times
o!Reinforce those barriers
•!They had put lines, invisible barriers, social barriers that blacks were not allowed to cross
and if they did the cops were all up on their case and would tell them to go back to their
neighborhoods. Blacks were alienated. You are culturally disoriented, no sense of identity in
terms of who you really are
•!The idea was to create not only a segregated society but those who felt as the minority were
treated fairly
•!After a while you began to internalize this and have a feeling of deep self hatred because you
see your self as almost having no value
•!To cope they kind of created their own society. Subpopulation. They felt like they had no
value.
•!At 7:00 p.m., August 11th, 1965, a man named Fry Marquette was stopped by cops by
suspicion of drunk driving even though he was sober. Cops wanted to impound his car. A
Document Summary
Movie lecture will be on the final. They felt like they had no value: at 7:00 p. m. , august 11th, 1965, a man named fry marquette was stopped by cops by suspicion of drunk driving even though he was sober. A crowd grew around the police, they called reinforcements and a scuffle grew out. Fry, his mother rina and brother ronald were all taken into custody: black elders thought they should just suck it up. They knew it was wrong but thought they should just live with it. They had come from worst times and thought that despite its flaws, La was still better than what it was (because they were used to saying yes man to a 12-year- old white boy). They would riot o when riots broke out in the news it brought in politicians and increases the likelihood of political intervention o cops would try to control the crowd o cops would shoot them in the back.
