Author: Kevin Abrams
Last Wednesday, on the night of Nov. 18, students packed into Fowler 302 to view Bastards of the Party, a documentary exploring the creation and history of L.A.’s two most infamous gangs, the Bloods and the Crips.
The event was hosted by La Mont Terry, an assistant professor working in Oxy’s Education Department, who currently teaches a course entitled “Socio-Cultural Foundations of Education.” One of the many issues studied in the course, Terry said, is “gang violence [. . .] how gangs get involved in the lives of urban youth.”
The film was narrated and directed by Cle Sloan (a.k.a. Bone), a disillusioned Blood from Athens Park who, after serving a sentence in prison, grew concerned about gang violence. He now works to “make a change from inside,” he said in the film. Once his prison term was over, Sloan decided he would begin to study these gangs for himself, with hopes to alleviate the situation for L.A.’s more vulnerable neighborhoods and residents.
The first half of the film focuses on the situation of African Americans in L.A. throughout the 20th century. The 1940s brought about a ‘migration,’ in which blacks began moving to Los Angeles to escape the racism and discrimination of the South, but soon found that the situation here wasn’t much better. Consequently, they began to group together as a means of defense against aggressive white gangs, which they called ‘spookhunters.’
White residents gradually began to move to other neighborhoods, and as time went on, tensions began to grow among these black groups. Years later, however, black politics became more organized and communal: the mid-1960’s gave birth to the Black Panther Party (BPP) and, soon after, the US Organization. These two organizations had something of a competitive relationship, with the Black Panthers known as the more aggressive group and with the U.S. Organization seen as more passive – as “armchair revolutionaries.”
Though these parties were initially growing and picking up support, they were soon brought down by the federal government in the form of Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO).
One of the film’s main arguments, and the one from which the film gets its name, is that the modern gangs now plaguing Los Angeles are the “bastard children” of these broken up parties. “Out of the ashes of the BPP” narrates Sloan, “came the gangs, the Crips, the Bloods.” Sloan goes on to describe the gangs as similar to the parties, but lacking in true leadership, noting that the Crips actually have a constitution similar to that of the Black Panthers.
Professor Terry expressed after the film that this historical account of the current gang situation should not be marginalized. “Too often […] the approach of the broader public is to criminalize all urban youth, regardless of their participation in gangs, without understanding the broader sociopolitical and economic circumstances which have led to their development,” Terry said. “I believe one of the most profound messages that this movie communicates is that, while we readily decry gang as profane and unacceptable, we rarely acknowledge the political-economic crime and racism which has shaped black Los Angeles and, thus, gangs in black Los Angeles.”
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