Segregation, Self-Help & Gangs

by Leigh Graham

categories: Cities, Culture of Poverty, Education, Incarceration & Crime, Inequality, Jobs & Unemployment, Policy, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender

Published September 02, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT

What do Thrivent Financial, New Orleans's Mardi Gras Krewe Zulu, and Salvadorans With Pride all have in common?  Their roots are in mutual aid societies providing insurance, benefits and assistance for racial/ethnic minority groups at a time when these groups could not access help in mainstream society.

How are these groups different? Today, Thrivent Financial is a Fortune 500 financial services company for Lutherans with $61B in assets.  The African-American Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club is one of the premier Mardi Gras attractions in New Orleans.  Salvadorans With Pride is a gang of Salvadoran immigrants in suburban Long Island.  All three groups were born of economic hardship and ethnic/racial segregation in the United States.  Now policymakers, criminologists and social workers trying to halt gang violence are going one step further and trying to harness the youth development and social support that gangs provide.

The Youth PROMISE Act, introduced this summer in the House and Senate, promotes prevention and intervention to thwart gang violence before it begins.  It is an alternative to the incarceration and zero tolerance policies that have long fueled our response to gangs.  In Boston, a city known nationally in the 1990s for its drop in homicides due to community policing and intervention strategies, major foundation funds are being poured into street worker programs, where former gang members act as mentors and role models for youth in high crime neighborhoods where gangs proliferate.   Legislation and programs like these try to fill the gaps for these typically low-income kids who are at risk for gang membership: inserting adults who can act as father figures and build trust on the streets, working with kids and families to stay in school, providing safe spaces in churches or community centers for kids to go instead of the streets, offering counseling, or launching recreation or jobs programs at night or in the summer when kids are most idle and unsupervised - and providing skills development in the process.

Arguably the biggest risk factor for success here is the enormous tide of fear and violence against which these small but high impact programs operate.  There's the widespread availability of guns and the constant threat of gun violence, there's high levels of distrust to be overcome with disaffected youth, there's the need to build family support in overworked, stressed households, and there's diffuse public fear of gangs and minority groups that constantly threatens the funding and political support for these programs.  It's quite a mental shift for us to see working with gangs as a way to stabilize communities and give kids a chance to succeed. Yet this is a needed approach if we want to slow the violence that rocks isolated low-income communities - usually communities of  color - in the cities and the suburbs.

What we're not dealing with here is the racial residential segregation that continues to plague US neighborhoods.  This is where our fair and affordable housing policies, transit development, and investments in public education come in.  At the end of the day, if we can't provide better education, accessible career opportunities, and affordable housing options in a range of neighborhoods, then the appeal of gang membership and its promises of financial and emotional security remains high.  And without an end to racial/ethnic discrimination, we're unlikely to see Salvadorans With Pride evolve into the next Thrivent anytime soon.

(Zulu Krewe, Mardi Gras 2009, by howieluvus)