Gangs and Tribes

Blacks, intensely tribal, seem uninterested in questions of guilt or innocence. To them, everything is race. Logic, truth, circumstances lack importance.

-- Fred Reed, "Applied Racial Anencephaly: Making Things Worse"

    Whatever our gang problem now, it could be (and will probably will be in the future) much worse. In a 2015 article from The New Yorker, "The Executioners of El Salvador," it discusses the growing violence in that country due to gangs and the war against them. From the article:

[S]ince the collapse, early last year, of the truce between local gangs and the government, the murder rate has risen by a staggering fifty-two per cent. Or this: El Salvador, with a population of a little over 6.3 million, registered more than six hundred murders in May, the most since the end of the civil war. (For comparison: despite its reputation for violence, Chicago, with a little under half the population of El Salvador, had forty-eight murders that same month.) Or this: more than thirty-five police officers have been killed so far in 2015.

It goes on to report:

Last week, the Salvadoran defense minister, David Munguía Payés, told the press that there were somewhere between five and six hundred thousand people involved with gangs. Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 are the two most powerful organizations, but there are many others. If that figure is to be believed, that’s about ten per cent of the country’s population dedicated to drug dealing, extortion, and mayhem—so what do you do? Again and again, I heard the same solution being offered, sometimes blithely, sometimes through jaws clenched in rage: kill them all. Kill their girlfriends and their families. Kill their children.

In his article, "Welcome to the Horde: What Tribe Really Means," John Mosby explains:

     Tribalism implies the possession of strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of the tribe from members of other groups. This separation is the foundation of the tribal construct.

     A tribe can be defined as a social group with these strong cultural (most important for our purposes) or ethnic ties, that exists outside of any loyalty to the state. Generally based on a shared social or genetic descent, the social structure of tribes can vary, but due to the inherently small size of tribes, as well as the clans and septs that make up those tribes, it is almost invariably a relatively simple social structure with few significant social distinctions between individuals.

* * * 

     Tribal societies focus—for reasons of survival—on the family, the clan, and the tribe, with everyone else a distant following consideration. In a nutshell, tribal societies can be said to focus on the following, in order of importance:

Family

Inner Circle/Clan

Outer Circle/Tribe

Rest of the World

     Families are held together by blood and the loyalty that implies. Clans may be based on blood, or blood-oath to the tribe. Loyalty to the tribe is really nothing more than an extension of loyalty to the clan, ....

     Loyalty in a family or clan is a blood-oath. It’s not a convenience issue. It’s not, “well, dude, I’d come over and help out, but American Idol is on television.” It’s not even, “Brother, I’d come help out, but I might get killed, and then who would take care of my family?” Clan or tribal loyalty is a matter of “if my brother needs help, I’m there.”

     ... the type of loyalty required of this type of blood-oath is not something you can develop over the internet. It’s not even something you can develop at a monthly get-together/training weekend. This is the type of loyalty, built on trust, that can only be built on constant, continuous, ongoing interpersonal contact and interaction. ...

* * *

     Stateless societies—whether due to the lack of formation of a state, or through the disintegration of the state (hmmmm?), share the common characteristic of resulting in tribalism, for both good and bad. From a long-term, individual survival standpoint, tribalism is actually pretty piss-poor, with the threat of ongoing small-scale but endemic warfare/conflict. ...

     From a short-term individual perspective, and a long-term family survival perspective, tribalism is actually as good as anything we’re likely to find in the future. You’ve got a ready-made community of like-minded people with shared values for community and companionship. You’ve got the added protection of friends and clansmen, rather than trying to fight off enemies all by your lonesome. You’ve got the ability to share efforts for greater efficiency in both the production of survival necessities and protection.

Unfortunately, for those of us living in suburbia or on a "ranchette," there are large cohorts living in urban ghettos and barrios that are organized around tribes, largely informally, but many times formally as gangs.

     Micheal Carly operates a web site about his experience and research into gangs and gang culture. He quotes one researcher: "Modern urban street gangs have evolved into tribal organizational structures. These new urban tribes have developed into a subculture in the streets of the urban jungle. They claim territory, are self-supporting, have their own language and customs, and establish their own rules and codes of conduct. Their customs are passed to new members by rites of passage from generation to generation, thus ensuring the continuance of the gang. Gang members identify themselves as a people that is separate from the rest of society." (quoting Etter, G. W., Sr., "Common Characteristics of Gangs: Examining the Cultures of the New Urban Tribes," Journal of Gang Research, as found in Volume 5, Number, 2, Criminal Justice Abstracts, p. 261, 1998).

     Describing American street gangs, Carly points out that gangs have their own culture, including symbols and symbolism, language (argot), beliefs and values. The latter, in particular, is what most particularly separates gangs from much of the rest of society. From Carly's article:

     The idea that gangs represent a subculture, combined with the notion that street gangs are most commonly found in lower class neighborhoods, has been around for nearly fifty years. As early as 1958, Walter Miller (1958), a well-respected American criminologist, was writing about this phenomenon.

     Miller believed "The lower class has a separate, identifiable culture distinct from the culture of the middle class." (Vold and Bernard, 1986, p. 214) "Where the middle class has 'values' such as achievement, the lower class has 'focal concerns' that include

• getting into and staying out of trouble ...
• toughness (masculinity, endurance, strength ... are all highly valued) ...
• smartness (skill at outsmarting the other guy; 'street sense' rather than high IQ) ...
• excitement (the constant search for thrills, as opposed to just 'hanging around') ...
• fate (the view that most things that happen to people are beyond their control, and nothing can be done about them) ... and
• autonomy (resentment of authority and rules).

Miller described this lower-class culture as a 'generating milieu' for gang delinquency." (ibid, p. 214). His characterization of focal concerns may also partially explain lower-class youths' behavior in defiance of the middle class, its laws, authority figures, and their tendency to be careless and aggressive (at least in the eyes of the middle class).

     Carly also observes that "[t]he culture of the gang is often a culture of violence. It is a culture of physical assaults, guns, knives, bats, and anything that one can use to protect him- or herself or gain advantage over another person or situation. Gang members are less inhibited about using violence than non-gang members and confer status upon winners of violent confrontations."

     Other researchers have likened gangs to tribes. A 1997 article at the Los Angeles Times summarizes a book by anthropologist Clayton Robarchek. From the LA Times article:

     It was in the 1950s that anthropologists first identified the tiny Waorani tribe near the Amazon River in Ecuador as the most murderous people on Earth.

     Virtually no one lived to old age. Entire families were routinely wiped out with 9-foot spears. And the notion of killing a child was no more abhorrent than the notion of killing a snake. A staggering six out of 10 Waorani deaths came at the hands of another Waorani.

     In a new book, an anthropologist who spent years studying the tribe asserts that today's urban gang violence is no less routine.

     "Killing a non-gang member for a pair of sneakers or a leather jacket is as easy and inconsequential for a gang member as it was for a Waorani to kill . . . for an ax or a machete," writes Wichita State University professor Clayton Robarchek in "Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War."

* * *

     The mere comparison of urban gangs to a jungle tribe is explosive on its face, evoking racial stereotypes of savagery certain to offend. It likens a primitive people who eat smoked monkeys, carve their own weapons and live in near isolation to urban adolescents who are economically deprived, racially segregated, jobless and growing up in a consumer-driven culture.

     But Robarchek said the two jungles, as he calls them, are similar in what they each lack--a community acting as a moral force more powerful than personal impulse. Among the Waorani, as in many large U.S. cities today, there was no obligation to any group other than a small, territorial band whose members knew only one way to get what they wanted--violence.

 There is a bright side, though:

     But after generations of killing to resolve the smallest conflict, the Waorani changed, convinced by missionaries that less violent behavior had worthwhile benefits. Virtually overnight, the murder rate in the tribe of 700 fell by more than 90%.

I imagine that a strong and confident Christianity could do the same for inner city gangs. While we often focus on the collapse of black families for the disfunction in black communities beginning in the 1960s, perhaps it would also be useful to examine the effect of the decline in Christianity in those same communities.