Gini Sikes

I've just read the most fucked-up parenting ever. Ever. EVER. This is talking about Latino girls in gangs in LA. For her daughter's 16th birthday, the mother gave her a gun. She also threw her other daughter out for using the birth control pill. Is shooting people not a mortal sin too?

Apparently not, not even to the police if its a female gang member that does it, and not especially to the young girls who get guns for presents and think that gang-banging is just a phase, and they won't be doing it forever. No, they won't but the people they've killed are dead forever when they have moved on to more conventional lives.

This book is primarily about Latina gangs and African-American ones with scarcely a mention of a couple of fucked-up white girls. No matter their bravado and their feeling of being as bad, as down, as their men, they are adjuncts, they are girls after boys, girls wanting to belong to the gang, girls who just do because that's their neighbourhood. Girls are the same the world over when it comes to the reasons for belonging to groups, its just that these ones are murderously dangerous.

The book is excellent, its not a sociological survey as Sudhir Venkatesh's [b:Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets|3420054|Gang Leader for a Day A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets|Sudhir Venkatesh|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255903974s/3420054.jpg|1483174] which I read not long ago. The differences in style are that the author of 8 Ball does not identify with the girls she interviews and the sociologist very much does even though he pretends to be objective. The opposite of what you thought I was going to say? The opposite of what I thought I'd read! Sikes' book is the most readable, there are plenty of characters, most either pathetic and dangerous, just plain pathetic or you have hope for them (but they are still dangerous). Venkatesh is more into detailing the gangs as alternative business units run by men who, outside of their violence, are as varied and mean or generous and involved or not as businessmen everywhere with the main interest and their personal lives. You see not much hope for the men, and there really isn't is there? Black and Latino gang members don't have a long life span, or a long one as free men in general.

Its hard for a man to leave a gang when he comes to his senses and understands his own mortality; he may never get out alive. Its easier for a girl. In the warped moral code of the gangs, a mother should be home looking after her children, cooking for her man and hiding is drugs and weapons from the law, she shouldn't be out on the street gangbanging. And these girls are mothers so young so when they realise that there is the possibility of life, not death, and even of becoming someone in the real world, there is the way out. Some make really make it, others, dragged down by too many children, too much poverty and the easy access to drugs never will. Some of them may even grow up to buy their daughters their special sweet-16 gift of a gun.


… (mer)