Race, Gangs and Youth Violence by Gunter Anthony

Author:Gunter, Anthony [Gunter, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781447322887
Google: iwVpDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2017-02-15T05:30:43+00:00

Representations of urban (black) youth cultures

Although in contrast to academic gang studies literature, the news media highlight the link between black youth and violent crime, there is very little discussion or acknowledgement as to the causes of this disproportionality, namely the acute social and economic disadvantage faced by many black young people, which is, according to liberal academics such as Sveinsson (2008), the direct consequence of institutional racism. In the absence of much academic engagement, contemporary race and youth crime debates, amplified and structured by the police and news-media reporting, are implicitly concerned with the deviant lifestyles and ‘gangsta culture’ of urban (read mainly black) youth.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 UK riots, historian and television pundit David Starkey himself made the national news-media headlines when he said on national television the ‘whites were becoming Black’ (Hastings, 2011) and that this was the cause of the riots. While his comments predictably drew support and condemnation in equal measure from conservative commentators on the one hand and liberals on the other, his key point was that the wanton violence and criminality glorified within the ‘destructive, nihilistic gangster culture’ of black youth ‘has become the fashion’ and been appropriated by white youth. The riots, in Starkey’s opinion, demonstrated that Enoch Powell and his apocalyptic 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which warned against the perils of continued black immigration to the UK, was right.

Tony Sewell, the black academic and head of a charity that encourages black young people to attend university, agreed with David Starkey that ‘gangsta culture is a poison spreading across all races’, and that the cause of the 2011 riots was not poverty or institutional racism, ‘but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music’ (Sewell, 2011). Senior national politicians such as Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011 after the riots and in 2006 as leader of the Conservative Party, and the Labour Party’s David Blunkett in 2003 as Home Secretary, have similarly linked violent gangster rap music to gangster gun and knife culture (BBC News, 2003, 2006). Of course for all those commentators and politicians who blame ‘black gangster rap culture’ for violent urban crime, there are many others who dismiss such linkages. So what then do academics have to say on the matter? As already noted gang criminologists in the UK have tended not to engage with issues of race or indeed culture, consequently any engagement with the media-driven debate on the role of ‘black gangster culture’ has been limited.

John Hagedorn in his book A World of Gangs takes issue with gang academics the world over for their blatant neglect of the significance of rap music culture in the lives of young men dealing with oppression, racism and increasing social marginalisation:

… it’s the music stupid. Gangsta rap and the worldwide embrace of hip-hop culture have been almost completely ignored by scholarship on gangs … The gangsta persona is a textbook glorification of gang culture, the very definition of what West calls ‘nihilism’.

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