I'm a big fan of the This American Life podcasts. Usually its just an entertaining way to put in my Monday commute but every so often they present a show that really stops me in my tracks, makes me forget where I am, and really listen.
They have done this twice in the last few weeks, with a two part podcast on Harper High School in Chicago. (I cannot recommend it highly enough - listen for yourself: Part one / Part two.) What the podcasts detail is a year in the life on an inner-city Chicago school and the reality for the students and staff of living with gang violence. In Act One of the first show reporter Linda Lutton sets the scene:
Maybe you think you have an idea of how street gangs operate. Crips and Bloods, People and Folks, controlling huge swaths of a city, shooting it out over drug territory. A single gang leader controlling thousands of members. A strictly enforced hierarchy branching out underneath him, with gang colors and hats tilted to the right or left.
For this hour, forget all that. The gangs in the Englewood neighborhood today are not those gangs. There's no central leader, no hierarchy, no colors. The fights aren't over drug territory. In fact, lots of these gangs aren't even selling drugs. They're different gangs, with different rules. These rules apply absolutely to boys. Girls get slightly more leeway.
Rule number one, look at a map. When I ask kids what their parents don't understand about gangs these days, they say it's this. Their parents tell them not to join a gang, as if there's some initiation to go through, some way to sign up. Today, whether or not you want to be in a gang, you're in one. If you live on pretty much any block near Harper High School, you have been assigned a gang. Your mother bought a house on 72nd and Hermitage? You're S Dub. You live across the street from the school? That's D-Ville.
When you ask kids or cops or school staff how it got like this, they'll tell you that at one point, this whole area was controlled pretty much by a single gang, The Gangster Disciples. But, and this is how most people tell this part of the story, Chicago police have been so effective locking up the big gang leaders that the hierarchy of those gangs has crumbled. And that's left a lot of room for newcomers.
Your gang might control nothing more than the block you live on. In Harper's attendance area alone, which is a couple square miles, there are more than 15 gangs, also known as cliques, sets, factions, or crews. Some don't have anyone in charge, but they do have guns. That's what every kid has told me. Otherwise, why would you call yourself a gang, they say.These 2 hours of radio have implanted themselves firmly in my head, as you might expect of something that brings you to tears on the platform of a train station. This week it came racing back to me in the discussion of insidious trauma in Kali Tal's essay Remembering Difference: working against Eurocentric bias in Contemporary Scholarship on Trauma and Memory. She quotes the trauma therapist Laura Brown who notes that the insidious threat of sexual abuse experienced by women in their everyday lives is often not understood because it is not an event outside the range of human experience, as the DSM-IV frames it. She writes::
The range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual in the lives of men of the dominant class; white, young, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, Christian men. Trauma is thus that which disrupts these particular human lives, but no other...Public events, visible to all, rarely themselves harbingers of stigma for their victims, things that can and do happen to men—all of these constitute trauma in the official lexicon. Their victims are rarely blamed for these events; (Brown, 1995:101-102)For kids stuck in inner city gangs violence and threat of death is constant and yet it is unaddressed, because they do not belong to the same group as those who define the range of human experience. In a way this was something i have always known but painfully quotidian nature of the violence and the survival tactics was completely new to me. I have included some more of the transcript below but I urge you to listen and experience the ache that comes from hearing it in their own voices:
Aaron Washington is a police officer assigned to Harper. He's there seven hours a day, seems to know every kid in the school. He says that for protection, for survival, kids walk to school with the kids in their clique, often through enemy territory. So I ask him, what if I'm a kid and I really don't want any part of this gang stuff? How can I avoid it?Officer Washington:You can't. It's not going to happen.
Linda Lutton: He says it used to be possible to be neutral-- what they called a "neutron."
Officer Washington: There is no neutrons anymore. It used to be if you play sports, or you were academically better than the average kid, they didn't bother you. Now it's different. It doesn't matter. If you live here, you're part of them. You live on that block, or you live in that area, you're one of them. The way they get to school, they have to come to school with one of these factions, one of these gangs. They're going to come to school with them. They don't have a choice.
Linda Lutton: I can hardly believe that a Chicago police officer is telling me this, admitting that kids don't have a choice about being gang affiliated. I've never heard police talk like this. Later, I ask Officer Washington if he'll get in trouble for saying this. I mean, aren't cops supposed to just tell kids, hey, don't join a gang?
Officer Washington: I'll put it like this. I'm not saying it's OK to be in a gang. And I'm not saying I approve of it, I agree with it. If I could take them all and say, "hey, look here, ain't no gangs," I'd do that. But this ain't a fairy tale.
Linda Lutton: And this is the point. Gangs aren't the bad kids in the corner here. They're the defining social structure in the school. It's who you sit with at lunch, the kids you say hi to in the hallway. It's the water everybody swims in.
Assistant principal Adams guesses that fewer than 10% of Harper students are actually gangbanging. That is, active on the block, involved in crime. He thinks all the rest of the kids in the school are just caught up by where they live. OK. So rule number one is know your geography.
Rule number two, never walk by yourself. One day at dismissal, I thought I saw a freshman walking home alone.
Linda Lutton: I stopped you because you're walking by yourself.
But I was wrong.
Student: We're walking with them.
Linda Lutton:Arnel pointed over his shoulder at a couple of girls about 15 feet back.
Linda Lutton:So you're actually walking with the girls back there?
Student: Yeah. I always walk with people home.
Linda Lutton: What's the advantage?
Student: It's not trying to get jumped on and shot. Because there be fighting and shooting up here almost every day. Because won't nobody mess with somebody in a group, walking in a group.
Linda Lutton: And that's true. But it's complicated because of rule number three.
Rule number three, never walk with someone else. See, walking into a group can send its own message. If you're with a group of boys in Englewood-- on your porch, walking home from school-- you're highlighting your affiliation, which makes you more of a target. It's a huge catch-22 for kids in this neighborhood. If you walk alone, you risk being jumped. If you walk with someone else, you risk being labeled as a gang member and being shot.
Rule number four, don't use the sidewalk. Every day at dismissal, kids drift out of Harper High School and walk along Wood Street-- actually, right down the middle of Wood Street. It's a strange scene. Cars drive slowly, waiting for students to move out of the way. One teacher told me that when she first arrived at Harper, she thought this was just plain hooliganism. The teenagers taking over. One afternoon, a girl named Alex explained, that's not it at all.
Alex: We feel safer like this. For some reason, we just feel safe like that. we never like to walk past trees and stuff, there's too much stuff going on.
Linda Lutton: "Too much stuff going on" is shorthand here for the shootings, the fights, the craziness. It's better to walk down the middle of the street, where you can keep a broad view of things, and where you have a few more seconds to run if you need to.
Rule number five, if they shoot, don't run. 12th grader Antoryio was on the Harper High School football team. In fact, he's one of the best running backs in the entire city of Chicago. On the field, he zips around linemen like they're not even there, cutting and weaving and then racing for the end zone. Those are skills he purposefully ignores when shot at.
Antoryio: I fall to the ground.
Linda Lutton: That's your strategy?
Antoryio: Yeah. Because if you run, you'll probably get shot in the back or something like that. So I just fall to the ground. Most people shoot from-- say if we in front of my house-- will shoot from the corner. Or do a drive-by in a car. So I just fall to the ground.
Linda Lutton: OK. By now, you may be wondering, if these gangs aren't fighting over drug territory, what are the shootings about? That brings us to rule number six.
Rule number six, you can be shot for reasons big and small. If you ask the police or school officials or kids what the shootings are about, they'll mention girls, money owed. There was a paintball incident that led to real guns going off. Petty stuff, like losing a fist fight. He-said she-said arguments. Often, they'll tell you a shooting is over nothing.
Retaliation for earlier shootings is a big reason for getting shot. Shootings can ping pong back and forth between rival gangs for years. Of course, you can also be shot for walking off your block.
And finally, rule number seven, never go outside. When I asked kids for advice about staying alive in this neighborhood, they told me the best advice was to stay away from your block as long as possible, every day. Get involved in something at school so you can stay as late as they let you. When you do go home, don't leave the house. Don't even go on the porch.
If you want to see the lengths you have to go to not be part of the gang, you should meet a senior named Deonte. Being anti-gang is Deonte's entire identity. He's an outspoken Christian. He holds Bible study in his living room. Other kids come to him for advice, a role he wholly embraces. He's poised to be the valedictorian. When you talk to Deonte, you get a sense of what it takes to stay away from the gangs.
Linda Lutton: Do you ever go out, just around the neighborhood?
Deonte: Oh, no. No, not at all. And in a way, that can be bad as well. Because that's when depression is easy to set in. That took a hold of me, because I've been in the house for about three years. I've been staying in the house a lot.
Linda Lutton: Do you feel lonely?
Deonte: At times. At times I feel lonely. A times, I would want to have some friends. Because I'm not really friends with anybody.
Linda Lutton: If you think about high school, how important friends are during that time, imagine going through that with your whole goal being to avoid your school's social structure. Completely, for four years. It's an incredibly high price to steer clear the violence. It's a price most teenagers anywhere would find almost impossible to pay.
