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Anna Waxman
Professor Petrovich
Introduction to Social Work - 10833
Take Home Exam
November 15, 2010
Crips and Bloods: Made in America

Crips and Bloods: Born in America left me with not only the feeling of enlightenment but
with many unexplained questions about our political and criminal systems. The film left me with
the feelings of and structure of the life of a true gang member. Between the inter-gang hierarchy,
the rules of behavior and the culture of guns, death, and dishonor. Crips and Bloods note that
more than 100,000 people have been shot and more than 15,000 murdered on the streets of Los
Angeles in the last 30 years. Why, then, has little been done to address it? If those killings took
place overseas, wouldn’t the U.N., the president, Congress all rise to condemn them as a
humanitarian tragedy?
I learned that there is plenty of blame to spread around for the growth of these street
gangs. We could finger economic racism, we could talk about a lack of a support network and
extreme police brutality or the changing US economy and historical discrimination, we could cite
statistics that say 80 percent of all drugs sold in America are actually consumed by white people,
or we could point out the fact that the vast majority of black males are now raised by single
mothers: all of which the movie does. Whatever the causes—and they are undoubtedly multiple
and the end result is shocking, they all tie into the social oppression of these groups from as early
as the 1950s.
Although the film was compelling and enlightening, I did not see the film as a credible
source. The director’s only major drawback to the vision is its lack of diversity in voices. He
finds some impressive and eloquent subjects—almost all of them former gangbangers who now
preach against the lifestyle. He largely avoids talking to current, in-the-life gangsters. That
diffuses much of the condescending tone an outsider documentary like this could have sported,
but it leaves the narrative without much modern voice. Exploitative as it might have been for a
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white filmmaker to get inside the minds of today’s street gangs, it could have given the film a
less academic approach. Similarly absent are more mainstream black political and civil rights
advocates, who could have put the film’s assertions in a wider context.
A certain factor that stuck out a lot to me as a cause for these gangs was classism, racism
and poverty. In the beginning of the film, three former gang members recount their experiences
of growing up in South Los Angeles in the 1950s, where segregation ruled over them and they
were denied the right to join the Boy Scouts of America. This form of classism and racism, led to
young black men beginning their own club where they could feel some sense of belonging, but
the only weapons they used back then were fists. While African Americans experienced
discrimination, it was also a time of black prosperity, while South Los Angeles was abundant in
industrial-based jobs. Although African Americans were segregated into one small community of
housings, it was the closest that the black community came to the “American Dream”. But in the
late 1950s, the US economy changed and factories such as Goodyear and Ford, along with all
other major industrial corporations closed their doors, leaving millions jobless and in poverty.
Institutional classism restricted the people living in Southern Los Angeles’ life opportunities
because of their socioeconomic status in the community.
The African Americans of South Los Angeles had been socially oppressed for long
enough. From getting pushed into designated communities, getting searched every time they
went outside, historical discrimination and the invisible social barriers created a strong and built
up hatred against authority. The anger over police intimidation and invisible social barriers still
sounds indignant and thoroughly justified after all these decades. The interviewees offer a brief
rundown of the Watts Riots of 1965 as the inevitable result of all this pent-up mid-century anger.
You would think those violent times would be a wake-up call for people both in and out of those
communities. But it wasn’t long before the bloody, drug-running street gangs we know today
took over. History even managed to repeat itself with the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. And still
we haven’t found solutions to the problems.
The movie states that one of the problems that has made the gang grow and rebel is that
we are locking up most of the male role models in the Southern Los Angeles children’s lives.
Without a strong and positive male figure in your lives, most children go and find a strong male
role model within the gang. The movie suggested that African Americans had many influential
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advocates and role models such as Martin Luther King Jr. and The Black Panthers. But when
many of these advocates were either put into prison or killed, the groups had no one else to
advocated for their rights so they took action into their own hands. Most of the current gang
members paint a bleak picture of the physical and social devastation in South Los Angeles
describing their gang life as a beneficial one showing them a life of status, protection, and a
family.
My ideas to stop the gang violence would be to look at this group by using Marslow’s
Hierarchy of needs. Are the children and gang members being served the five human
motivational needs of (1) physiological, (2) safety, (3) social, (4) esteem, and (5) self-
actualization. And also instead of just throwing important role models in jail for an extensive
amount of time for small petty crimes, we can solve these crimes through restorative justice.
That way we can find various strategies to find various strategies for finding resolutions to
criminal and human rights violations. This way we could satisfy everyone and bring social
justice for all parties. The most interesting thing that came up in the movie for me was that other
exerpts appeared throughout the film that had to do with offering other perspectives on gang
behavior and the disintegration of gang rule, which suggest ways to solve the underlying
problems of gangs, rather than attacking street gang-related violence. The most promising
solutions to stopping this gang violence came from the people of South Los Angeles themselves,
were former gang members take on the task of going into schools and providing children with
another alternative than gang membership.