Bang on the System: People’s Praxis and Pedagogy as Humanizing Violence

In the context of street gang culture, “banging” refers to the act of people protecting their perceived territory and fulfilling the vision and mission of a local collective, usually at the expense of other gangs. On one hand, gang banging often increases local crime, violence, and loitering that compromises the overall sense of safety many residents in a neighborhood may feel. On the other hand, gangs form as a result of community members feeling socially alienated from society because their voices go unheard and their positionality as human beings go unprocessed in a world of conformist views and values. Rather than submit to this alienation, individuals in gangs join forces with others against different collectives of people experiencing life similarly to them—as a result of social systems pitting community members against one another for a limited set of resources (Hagedorn, 2009; Perry, 2004). Instead of seeing the phenomenon of gangs from a deficit perspective, this article looks at the opportunities and potential held by these youth when educators are able to recognize and utilize community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) in response to the conditions they find themselves in—what editors of this issue refer to as “nurturing seeds of resistance.”

Exploring what it takes to bring dispossessed, gang-related, or other oppositional youth back into the folds of our classrooms must be a priority for urban education. In this sense, urban education concerns itself with the contradictions, pragmatics, and possibilities of teaching and learning in social contexts wherein public and educational policies impact historically brilliant yet underserved, overexploited communities of color. Schooling in urban communities is a multi-tiered social system perpetuating colonial domination, offering those on the margins the minimum amount of education so that power can be controlled by the ruling class. Urban schooling also inculcates people with the ideological underpinnings of society to keep them loyal to the existing social system, even if it is against the masses of people's own self-interest. Ignoring the social, academic, and holistic needs of youth who bang maintains this colonial hegemony in schools. This study illustrates for urban educators the proper context to understand how dispossession, poverty, and diasporic oppression is manufactured, and by understanding this, how urban educators can recognize the effects of colonial oppression on abovementioned youth and address it in their pedagogy.

To disrupt this dehumanization and dismantle existing schooling structures, it is important to summon the critical reflexivity of Third World revolutionary movements as critical, generative sites that participants in justice-centered urban education can learn from. Ayers (2018), a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground argues that, “New ideas…come from social practice and struggle. And the social practice and struggle of the 1960s was led from the Third World” (para. 6). Thus, we begin by examining the interrelatedness between systemic oppression, revolutionary theory, and critical race praxis to develop a pedagogical framework for subverting the legacy of colonialism in communities and schools. Towards this end, we utilize case study to illustrate how transformative resistance can be cultivated from spaces of horizontal violence, reactionary behavior and self-defeating resistance (Solorzano & Delgado-Bernal, 2001) via a People's pedagogy.

While our focus in this paper is on disrupting horizontal violence with youth that may be involved in street organizations (i.e., gangs), the People's pedagogy we advocate for can be useful for youth whose personal frustrations and social dissatisfactions inform the indignation they may bring into schools. These sensibilities are often a proxy for reputed urban youth. From our perspective, when it comes to gang-affiliated or gang-influenced youth, we are not opposed to their willingness to fight. Instead, we are opposed to their willingness to fight each other. We see it as the anti-oppressive educator's duty to encourage this particular group of young people to engage in a “liberating violence,” which is one “[that] possesses humanizing, life-affirming moment[s]” (Leonardo & Porter, 2010, p. 146). This Fanonian type of social engagement would help community members feel safe from horizontal violence because young people would begin to build, create, and protect spaces that have long been subject to the cruelty of the existing social order (Fanon, 1973).

Toward a People's Praxis and People's Pedagogy

Our attempt to pair CRP with revolutionary movements of the global South pushes us to engage a set of fundamental questions when understanding the internal and external forces that impact K-12 schools. These questions include but are not limited to the following inquiries: How can we co-create transformative educational spaces through a People's praxis to shift our understandings of the work needed to change our conditions? What does a People's pedagogy mean for young people that may be gang affiliated who are navigating white supremacy in the form of state-sanctioned violence, marginalization, and isolation?

As critical scholars, our entry point to critical race praxis is grounded in critical race theory (CRT). Predating its foray into education (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), legal scholar Eric Yamamoto (1997, 2000) challenges early critical race theorists to engage in a process that has less to do with abstract theorizing and spending more time building tangible solutions to address white supremacy in the everyday lives of people of color. From his observations and actions, he introduced the concept of Critical Race Praxis (CRP) to pair theory and action to address real-world conditions. From our viewpoint, to further our attempt to address horizontal violence, we must pair CRP with our interests in the history and litany of revolutionary movements of people of color worldwide.

As systemic forces stand strong in opposition to the liberation of oppressed peoples, we posit a People's praxis that repurposes Yamamoto's tenets while pairing them with revolutionary theories of People's movements. Connecting with these efforts is an important genealogical tracing of how we understand history being present in the current moment. In his book Interracial Justice, Yamamoto (2000) offers the following four aspects to the praxis: the conceptual (identifying the issue and the work to be done), the material (what resources are needed to address the concern), the performative (the actual physical and mental work that is paired with the material), and the reflexive (revisiting what we’ve done to address the concern with a commitment to improve our work moving forward).

In education scholarship, CRP pushes justice-centered educators to engage a particular set of questions regarding the duality of schooling: if we know that “schooling” is primarily order and compliance with very little learning involved, how do we demonstrate a commitment to “education” that will ask critical questions of the school's existence? More importantly, if “education” is our purpose and goal, what are we willing to do to ensure that it happens? Yamamoto's call to engage the conceptual, material, performative, and reflexive is also a call to rethink how we approach education, particularly for the people we say we care about.

The System

In the same vein, we agree with Ginwright (2017) call for activists to turn their attention to what they are for more than what they are against, while we also resonate with Assata Shakur's (Common, 2000) sentiment: “You … Askin me about freedom? I know a whole more about what freedom isn't than about what it is, cause I’ve never been free.” Beginning our analysis from a materialist perspective, we believe that young people must be taught to see a future beyond their current reality, while also being brought into a process that will allow them to fight against the real oppressor—the “nation's political system” of “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist [hetero] patriarchy” (Hooks, 2010, p. 2)—all of which stands at odds with the history and dignity of the communities they consider themselves to be a part of.

Critical research across disciplines has referred to this systemic oppression as structural violence (Farmer, 1996), state-sanctioned violence (James, 2003), and the prison nation (Gilmore, 2007; Richie, 2012). We understand the conditions in many urban communities as one where engineered conflict (Stovall, 2018) is manufactured by way of state-sanctioned violence—as schools, mental health centers, and access to healthy food options in urban spaces are shuttered due to purported budget shortfalls, residents of these communities are reminded of their perpetual disposability (i.e., current coronavirus health pandemic).

A plethora of tensions often arise from the lack of access to life-sustaining entities. Because some communities have historical tensions that may associate gang affiliations with neighborhood residency, animosities have the potential to be awakened tenfold when members of other communities are forced to engage with others they may not know. As always, this should be complicated and understood within the colonial frame of dispossessing people of knowledge of themselves and their conditions. It also must be taken into account when understanding state-sanctioned violence via planned instability. Critical to this dynamic is the assumption of criminality that is placed on Black and Brown youth before the belief in their capacities as human beings to change and improve their conditions.

People's Pedagogy as Humanizing Violence

As two cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, men of color, we couple critical race praxis with the ideological development of revolutionary theory to complicate, disrupt, and reimagine the ways in which traditional ideologies of masculinity in revolutionary movements have defined conflict. From this pairing, it is critically important to understand how we are positioning violence. Instead of the common descriptor of “violence” to discuss intentional physical, mental, or structural damage by way of injury, force, or intimidation, we utilize Leonardo and Porter’s (2010) take on a “humanizing violence”:

… is not violent in the usual and commonsensical sense of promoting war, injury, or coercion. Insofar as the theory of violence we put forth is positioned against racial domination, it is violently anti-violence. To the extent that racial violence is structured in discourse, we argue that dislodging it will require a violent undertaking in order to set pedagogy on a humanizing trajectory. (p. 140)

As authors of this document, we are well-aware of the contradictions involved in violent behavior in the traditional, cis-hetero, toxic, hyper-masculine sense of the term. Instead, we understand that a “humanizing violence” takes into account the definition of violence that invokes a “swift and intense force” that challenges us to work with others to change our conditions. Just as Leonardo and Porter comment on a psychic violence that is aimed at crushing the hopes of the oppressed, we understand that the road to reach a humanizing violence may or may not include traditional violence (e.g., armed resistance, guerrilla warfare, etc.) in the larger struggle for self-determination. For these reasons, the process of humanizing ourselves and our struggle means recognizing the urgent necessity to resist the oppressor while determining a theory and strategy of liberation.

In reality, some of the People's movements whose theories inform our work have used the concepts of self-defense and armed struggle in the name of humanization (Black Panther Party in the U.S., FRELIMO in Mozambique, PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau, Mau-Mau in Kenya, Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the Katipunan in the Philippines, etc.). Similar to political scientist and cultural critic Parenti (1997) position, however, we recognize that the ethics of “revolutionary violence” has been “somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform” (p. 29). In his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. even publicly questioned his position on non-violence and the violence used by “desperate, rejected, and angry young men,” by stating, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” Colonialism is violence in large and small ways, in daily relationships of power, in massacres, and health statistics. The violence of resistance—not just for reform but for fundamental change—is miniscule. With this being the case, we understand that “[R]evolutionary development invites fierce opposition from apostles of the free market, whose violent resistance to social change makes peaceful transformation impossible to contemplate” (p. 28).

In City of Quartz, former Students for a Democratic Society activist Mike Davis (1990) wrote, “The Crips and the Bloods are the bastard offspring of the political parties of the 1960s. Most of the gangs were born out of the demise of those parties. Out of the ashes of the Black Panther Party came the Crips and the Bloods and the other gangs” (xx). This was between 1970 and the early 1980s, when access to jobs were dislocated because at least 14 major plants closed just east of South Central Los Angeles. This trend of deindustrialization was rampant throughout U.S. urban industrial areas during those decades. The Davis quote inspired Cle Shaheed Sloan's documentary film title, “Bastard of the Party,” a documentary covering the creation of Los Angeles's Crips and Bloods. Both Davis and Sloan argue that the crisis of Black leadership and movements based on collective action gave way to the individualism fueling much of Los Angeles's gang fervor.

Informing a People's praxis is the fact that ethnic people throughout the world have been colonized in the first place is evidence of their inherent abundance of culture, resources, and humanity. Part of the miseducation of colonial schooling is intended to mystify this history from communities of color and their teachers so they are not empowered to reclaim what has been stolen or recover from the legacy of harm this has caused. This disempowerment is part of the colonial project, intended to maintain the social order that colonialism has established in and against communities of color. A People's pedagogy aims to transform these tensions, conflicts, and contradictions through teaching and learning.

People's pedagogy illustrates for educators the proper context for understanding how dispossession, poverty, and diasporic oppression is manufactured. Rather than blaming poor, working poor, working class, students of color and colonized people for not conforming to the existing social structure, these educators are able to see that their objectives must be to connect their teaching with the needs of the communities that they serve. This includes (but is not limited to) providing a curriculum that affirms their humanity while seeking the redistribution of power as one of their long-term objectives.

Positionality, Case Study, and Community and School Context

“Bang on the System” is an interdisciplinary, qualitative analysis of praxis in an educational setting. We honor Jayakumar and Adamian’s (2015) call for critical race praxis for educational research (CRP-ED) that is relational and mutually engaging, redefines hegemonic systems, sees research as a dialectical space to disrupt domination, and critically engages policy through practice. In our analysis, our personal racial, economic, political and social locations are central to how we understand, refute and navigate our worlds. In recent writing, Camangian (Cam) examines his identity as a former member in a Filipino gang and Stovall analyzes his relationship to struggle as a lifelong Black Chicagoan and educator living under white supremacy in the form of hyper-segregation, disinvestment, and marginalization (Camangian et al., 2021). In this way, the analysis we draw is rooted in deeply personal perspectives knowing that we extrapolate a revolutionary pedagogy of race praxis that is useful for those working to transform unjust social conditions that are similar to the realities we had to navigate as youth.

Interpretive case study (Stake, 2005) is utilized to illustrate praxis from a corpus of existing longitudinal, ethnographic data collected by Cam through pedagogical and teacher action inquiries in some of California's most underserved schools. In this manner, we treat the classroom as a situated cultural site, “a site that places the teacher as both participant and observer in an intense social negotiation of attitudes, beliefs, values, and practices” (Alexander, 2006, p. 104). This year-long study took place in a traditional English class where Cam applied critical interpretations of California learning standards. The focal class had a roster of 38 students: 17 Black boys, 15 Black girls, 4 Brown boys, and 2 Brown girls.

Community and School Context

Southwest High School ² (SHS) opened in 1969 with a 98% African-American student demographic. Henry Jackson, a Black man and the school's second principal in the early 1970s, described SHS by saying, “Drugs were everywhere. Gang bangers were everywhere. So many of the men [in the community] had come home from Vietnam as damaged goods. It was just a bad, bad time. The schools reflected the streets” (Sokolove, 2004, p. 28). Historically, gangs represented power in the Southwest District and often times afforded recognition to young men previously ignored by their peers (Jah & Shah’Keyah, 1997). The achievement in sports and music—the aspect of the school that continues to be celebrated for bringing great pride because of their success—has historically been emphasized by the school more than its academics.

SHS was typically associated with the Victory Hood Crip (VHC) in local and national street cultural circles, often referred to in hip-hop culture for its contribution to “reality rap” and influence over the national spread of local gangs. Around the time of this case study, it was reported that VHC was, “the largest black criminal street gang in the City of [Sun] with over 1,600 active members—the size of an Army brigade” (Barrett, 2004, para. 1) and were one of the first three gangs in Sunny City to receive a city gang injunction, which barred alleged members “from carrying pagers or cell phones, wearing gang attire, gathering in public and engaging in other activities deemed to help create a nuisance” (Leovy, 2003, p. B1). Just two weeks before the start of the focal school year, ³ a recently graduated alumnus, Arif Asad, was fatally shot. Arif Asad was a popular figure on campus, a team captain on one of SHS's sports teams, and regarded as a “genius” by a colleague of Cam's in the English department. And depending on who told the story, the details of Asad's murder differed. His murder led to a series of retaliations back and forth between the VHC and their primary rival, the Central City Gang. Despite the dangerous consequences related to gang participation, gangs continue to play a major role in local youth culture. Paradoxically, it is a common sentiment that in order to raise your social capital as a young man in the Southwest District, there are three effective options: be football or basketball players, a musician, or join a gang.

Although Asad's, and the subsequent, shootings took place in the immediate vicinity of the high school, on a street popularly associated with the VHC and in a neighborhood where a large number of Southwest students in the SHS kindergarten to high school pipeline lived, issues of gang and other horizontal violence, mourning, or institutional racism were hardly discussed during the two weeks of professional development days that preceded the opening of the following school year—similar to every other year Cam was there—or even the faculty meetings that occurred throughout its academic calendar.

People's Pedagogy in Real Time

Taking from the previous section, we adjust the entry components of CRP and adjust them to classroom needs in communities experiencing historical divestment, marginalization and isolation. The adjustments seek to address horizontal violence using the broad tenets of CRP (conceptual, material, performative, reflexive) and shape them to the classroom needs of teachers engaging with young people who have been historically dispossessed of viable and relevant education. From Yamamoto's tenets we have adapted his original framework and have applied it to what we refer to as a People's praxis.

Conceptual: Given the existing social system, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students deserve an education that builds a unified social movement to overturn the existing colonial system. Attempting to integrate BIPOC communities into the current system of dehumanization is not a solution at all.

If we are teaching young people who may exhibit “banging” sensibilities in our classrooms, a People's pedagogy in our classrooms requires educators to:

Understand the material concreteness & intricacy of systemic violence that we are up against and the necessity to name it as such. If we are not careful, whitewashed frameworks of fairness, kindness, and/or justice can be reflective of a much more evolved form of subjugation.

Teacher as Big Homie: A Case Study in Cam's English Classroom

It was the first day of school. Cam greeted each student with an index card and told them to follow the instructions on the board to fill out requested information, music playing in the background. Each desk had a composition notebook and pen for those who did not come with materials. After students finished filling out their index cards, Ca, had them pass it towards the front and instructed them to open the first page of the composition notebook and fill out the top of page one with, Table of Contents, write Opening Lecture and page 2 underneath. Cam then instructed students to write out South African Apartheid Abolitionist, Steve Biko's, famous quote: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.” He provided a narrative analysis of this quote, and key definitions. Cam was feeling really good about the focus of the group, most students following the note-taking and listening instructions he was teaching. Given his experience at the school, Cam was familiar with its reputation for high levels of culturally irrelevant academic disengagement even at the onset. The disengagement was more about the structural incompetence of the institution that has historically instilled cultural mistrust among students for many of their teachers.

Twenty or so minutes into class, two students—Marcus and Winston, both sixteen years old at the time—strutted in casually, chatting on their way to two open seats next to one another, not acknowledging Cam as the classroom teacher despite him standing in the front of the class. After a few minutes of continuing with his lecture, Marcus and Winston laugh at something unrelated to the lesson. Based on Cam's relative street sensibilities as a youth and young man, and now mid-career teacher still shifting identities, he felt his heart skip a beat. Cam remembers thinking to himself, “Oh, damn, they’re laughing while I’m teaching.” He paused his lecture and stared at them long enough to communicate his disapproval, as they both saved face by calmly stopping their verbal communication.

A few minutes after that, he hears Marcus say to Winston, “I put that on V-Y, cuz.” “Cuz” is a term of endearment used by crips to affirm their allegiance to one another as affiliates on the same side of the blood and crip gang rivalry. Saying, “I put that on,” is similar to court proceedings when witnesses are asked to put their right hand on a bible as an oath to speak the truth. In his mind, Cam quickly processed that they must been having another conversation as he was teaching. He felt that they disrespected his teaching, but simultaneously he knew that he wanted to address it in a manner they would understand more clearly. He stopped his lecture, looked at Marcus again and told him something to the effect of, “I don't care what gang you are from. Intellectually or physically, you do not scare me.” Reflecting on this incident, Cam would not use similar undertones in the same way given his experiences as a seasoned educator who has incorporated patience and care in his practice, but at the moment, the intentionality of his words felt necessary.

Cam stood there, looked at Marcus firm in his belief that what he was teaching was much more important than whatever conversation they were having. Marcus stared back, smirking, his peers watching the interaction between teacher and student, and sat back quietly deferring to the expectation Cam had for him and Winston to respect the teaching and learning he was trying to establish on day one. Cam continued the lecture, using visual aids to discuss dominant narratives and hegemonic ideologies, counter-narratives, voice, and counter-hegemony. He finished the lecture by discussing how their English Composition course that year would address hegemony by developing students’ capacity to practice counter-hegemony. Cam felt good about the lesson. Students seemed interested. This must be said because it was widely known—then and now—that SHS students were generally not enthusiastic about run-of-the-mill lessons presented to them in their classes. Much of this is because students were engaging in a practice of “willingly not-learning” (Kohl, 1994) given the normalization of cultural irrelevance and low teacher expectations on campus.

On their way out of class, Marcus walks Cam's direction with Winston trailing by his side, points to him and says, “Man, I’ma like you, cuz,” before exiting the door. The exchange was a show of respect. Marcus could have easily left class right after the bell rang. He could have also communicated his appreciation for the lesson in a more traditionally respectful way, using more mainstream, academically acceptable English. Instead, he communicated his appreciation for the lesson in a way that maintained his posture as someone who was gang affiliated, and even extended a gesture of camaraderie by calling Cam “cuz.” Cam, communicating non-verbally his understanding of that language as inclusive from Marcus's perspective, did not take offense to the gesture of his word choice. While there are many ways one can express high expectations of their students, the principle we extract from instances like these is that teachers must hold young people accountable in ways that make them feel loved. In this moment Cam was able to speak a language that Marcus understood, but also engaged in a practice rooted in the idea that it is not the only language students like him understand.

Humanizing Violence in the ’Hood

During the presentation of their research findings a few weeks later, Marcus described how during the same night their research proposal was approved, him and Winston went to the home of their big homie. A big homie is a more experienced gang member, well-respected for their contributions to their gang, and offers mentorship for less-experienced gang members so they can more effectively navigate their membership. Marcus explained that their big homie invited them into his garage, but curiously, locked the door behind them as they walked in. After sitting Winston down, the big homie physically held him accountable for not holding up his end of a financial agreement. Marcus described pulling out his pistol and saying to himself, “I’m going to shoot this motherfucker in the head.”

Marcus said that at that very moment, he started reflecting on the classroom conversation earlier that day when his peers had questioned his group about gang affiliation being detrimental to their community. Marcus said at that very moment—in that moment of truth, while he was holding his pistol, contemplating using it in some way, shape or form, he engaged in praxis (action and reflection in the world in order to change the condition). He said to himself, “I don't want to be a modern day Uncle Tom.” Because of the conclusion he drew at that very moment, he somehow, someway talked themselves out of the quandary. Earlier that day, their research project had been approved and they were in the data collection stage of their community action research project. They walked out of the garage and as they were walking down the driveway away from their big homie's garage, Marcus recounted the first thing he told Winston to break the tension of what they just experienced: “Damn, we got some good ass data, cuz.” The class broke out in laughter after sharing this first-hand ethnographic observation of masculinity in Victory Hood Crip. Cam was an audience member, conducting his own teacher research, and often jokes when presenting this case study that he was also thinking to himself, “I got some good ass data, too.” The joke is Cam's way to celebrate how data collection can be relevant for students, people and young men with backgrounds in gangs, and others who would normally reject traditional notions of research because of its association with the status quo.

Their presentation led to a discussion that was relevant and highly engaging, for the students in the class. The following dialogue illustrates the ways in which youth made sense of their reality collectively, not necessarily seeing eye-to-eye, but engaging one another so they could process the roles that vertical and horizontal violence plays in the community, their own lives, and in the lives of the people they love. Jaime, a goth styled, Latino student asked the presenting group, “Who do you think is responsible for gangs and gun violence?” Darren, a student whose family had strong gang affiliations but who was not, himself, part of any gang, answered, “I feel it's a big fight for territory. And they tryna expand just like the Europeans did back in the day. They try to take over another hood or something like that. So that they can have more territory. It's all a big fight over territory.” Winston added, “we was raised, it's all for one and one for all, and get your chips (money) however you can even if you gotta do things to your own peoples …” Sandra, a Latina who was usually reserved, but engaged non-verbally, questioned Winston's answer by asking, “Why do you think gangs are responsible for [violence], because of the way they were raised?” Clarifying his perspective, Winston raised his eyebrows, thought about his response for a few seconds, and said, “[Our families] ain't really have nobody like role models … our people was all hooked on drugs … the government put the drugs and the guns here and that's why a lot of us don't have no fathers … or nobody to teach us right from wrong.”

Janette, coming from a three day absence, tearing, shared how her family—three male cousins, one of their girlfriends, and a child-aged girl cousin were shot at her grandmother's house two days prior. One of her male cousins was shot twice in the chest and in critical condition. She shared this story to raise the question of horizontal, gang-related violence on a personal level, saying, “the main thing that kept popping up in my head when y’all were presenting was, what if they shoot at my grandmother's house again while me and cousins are not there? What if my little cousin had got hit while she was outside playing? What if I had got hit?” The room was somber as she shed tears about the content of the group's research resonating so closely to her recent experiences.

The dialogue turned to the type of horizontal violence that takes place beyond gangs. To redirect some of the audience member's rationalizing of horizontal violence, Cam asked the class, “What if we could reduce 100% of violence that exists, or that we participate in, to 25% of violence? How much closer would we be to having solidarity?” Tamika responded, “There is only so much we can let go. Like, you saying okay if somebody lose a fight, or whatever, just let it go. ‘Let it slide. Let it slide.’ Or, whatever. But people can be doing that their whole life and they may finally, they just tired of it. You can only take so much.” Shandra contributed, “If you look at other people in different gangs or whatever, you realize that they all the same blood. You all deal with the same shit. You all got these, whatever you all call big homies, telling you to do this and do this and do that. But you all still have the same oppressor. You are still dealing with the same shit.” As she was speaking, Matthew, one of the presenters, added, “We going through the same stuff.” Shandra continued:

You all going through the same stuff, so sooner or later you all realize, okay. We more alike than anybody you know, than you think you know … You not the only one dealing with this. You got a whole bunch of people dealing with this. The people you say your enemies can actually help you through.

Students constructed theory through scaffolded activities to analyze their reality via community based research. The relevance of this study sparked important dialogue and helped everyone recognize that participating in horizontal violence of any form did not provide solutions to the problems that confronted them as a community.

Learning by Being Ourselves

During his end-of-the year interview, Marcus explained what he learned as a community member when provided the type of education that began with his humanity.

I realized that I was a slave, you know what I’m saying, but I broke those shackles though. I started to look at life critically … Like, “damn, this [is] crazy. My mind is trapped … I’m incarcerated mentally … I’ve gotta break free.” [The learning] just basically opened my eyes, you know, [I] just found out who I was, you know, what I’m about. Really.

Marcus's evolving lens allowed him to see himself as a potentially more productive member of society. Instead of feeling alienated from school, he began to develop a sense of civic engagement:

Once the texts opened up my eyes, I seen everything. You know what I’m saying? I seen everything. I freed myself. Like I told myself, “I’m not about to get caught up in this shit no more. I’m not going to jail. I’m about to use the game, I’m about to use the system to win the system. You feel me? I’m about to go to school, and I’m going to stay in the hood so I’ma just educate myself. I’ma do this, and I’ma grind here. If I could grind in the hood, then you know for sure I could go to school and grind. Cuz in the hood, it's harder. The school can't fuck with the hood. That's just how it is.

As far as learning was concerned, Marcus spoke about the unique experience of studying himself, his interests, and his most pressing needs in school.

This unit is evidence of Marcus being able to fulfill California State Standards focused on reading comprehension and its focus on Informational Materials, especially Expository Critique 2.6, which ask that students, “Critique the power, validity, and truthfulness of arguments … and the extent to which the arguments anticipate and address reader concerns and counterclaims (e.g., appeal to reason, to authority, to pathos and emotion)” as well as its focus on literary response and analysis. Literary Criticism standard 3.8's aim for students to “analyze the clarity and consistency of political assumptions in a selection of literary works or essays on a topic” and 3.9's aim to “analyze the philosophical arguments presented in literary works to determine whether the authors’ positions have contributed to the quality of each work and the credibility of the characters (Philosophical approach)” are also addressed. His commentary, however, is less about the rigor he and his group fulfilled in relation to state standards, but more so the approach that helped him fulfill the standards:

At first, I had to learn how to be myself in class cause I never did that before. Since kindergarten on up, I wasn't able to be myself in class. So, at first, I had to really get used to being myself and after that … I can just take them ways and get and learn like that … I find school much easier, coming to school, being myself … use my frustrations … and, basically, my depression when I come to school and just use it, just write about it … Just basically just be myself.

When working with students who have historically been alienated from school, it is important to bring them into the type of learning they have been alienated from.

Conclusion: People's Praxis and People's Pedagogy as Seeds of Transformative Resistance

To reiterate, this paper does not condone gang violence in the traditional sense of the term. From a People's praxis perspective, our concern arises in terms of who or what they are deciding to bang on. During this current moment of global resistance to anti-Black state-sanctioned violence, certain gangs in Chicago have tacit arrangements with law enforcement to stoke tensions between Black and Latinx sets—this is a matter of gangs banging for the system. In this regard, the system recognizes the power that bangers have inside of their own communities. Rather, we are advocating that we teach young people to use their righteous indignation against the very social system responsible for it—to bang on the system. As illustrated throughout the case study analysis, the intention of a People's pedagogy is to uplift the important aspects of bangers’ humanity evidenced in these young people's ability to defy subjugation in their position as social outcasts.

From this pedagogical perspective, subtracting these sensibilities from them is ineffective in engaging these young people because it is often these defense mechanisms that serve as sources of pride formulated as responses to social forces of oppression. When revisiting Solorzano and Delgado Bernal (2001) framework to consider ways to plant seeds of resistance in other parts of the quadrant, a People's pedagogy asserts that the best way to transition these young people from reactionary behavior and self-defeating resistance is to challenge them to use their energy, (out)rage, and willingness to fight to protect the interest of their communities via pedagogical ruptures that lead to transformative resistance.

If teachers are not careful, they could be participating in the same vertical, systemic violence that students are trying to resist. Rather than focus on the supposedly violent traits of those engaged in horizontal violence (gang members in this instance), a People's praxis and pedagogy understands the primary violence that teachers need to be mindful of is one that is systemic in nature. By understanding the impacts of U.S. history on the daily lives of historically dispossessed people, one can become clearer with how morally bankrupt it is for educators to question the choices that bangers make in order to simply survive the intersecting systems of oppression confronting them. Bangers—like other oppressed people—have been failed by every institution that is intended to address their needs. They have been failed by the government, failed by institutions of housing and employment, failed by the criminal justice system and law enforcement and failed by K-20 educational institutions.

The vertical, systemic violence that bangers experience often force them into underground economies and counter-cultural social spaces. This societal failure leaves self-medication and outlaw culture as seemingly viable solutions to manage the pain of being alienated from institutions that are supposed to support their growth. Instead, these institutions treat them as disposable, undesirable segments of society. All these spaces function to humiliate, harass, and degrade them, their friends, and their family members daily for resisting in the ways they do. The resistance they demonstrate to this type of dehumanization may not make total sense to those who are privileged enough to ignore these realities, but it should be understood in its proper context.

Teachers should not discount the fact that these students are potentially already critically conscious, even though their social practices might not reflect it. Bangers may still be engaged in reactionary behavior or self-defeating resistance because it seems like doing so provides practical solutions to their most pressing problems. Being aware of how horizontal violence comes as a result of vertical violence allows these young people to get into the space to reflect on transformative resistance. In turn, it is the job of teachers to help them redirect that consciousness into socially transformative practice. Teachers need to understand how they themselves can participate in the vertical violence—violence from authority—and exacerbate horizontal violence by not recognizing the tensions that exist with their students, amongst the students’ peers, and in their students’ world. If teachers do not recognize how these tensions are a product of systemic violence, then they lack the potential to use their students’ righteous indignation against the very system that has created it.

Teachers who do not understand how the ideas in this article play out in the lives of the bangers they teach conform to structural violence and by extension function as tools of the system to inflict further harm. The youth we identify as “bangers,” those who are part of gangs and others whose sensibilities are informed by gang bang culture, deserve a quality education. Despite how their assumed oppositional orientation to education might make their teachers feel, it is still necessary to treat these young people with the respect and dignity that human beings everywhere deserve. To victimize those whose communities are objects of this systemic violence through teaching that is incongruent with gang bangers’ needs is unacceptable. Teachers, when not addressing this structural violence with their students through their teaching, are complicit in the systemic harm that has alienated so many young people of color from schools.

The decisions by young people of color to embrace one of the few ways of being that value them for who they are and where they come from should not surprise educators when many gang-affiliated youth resist social systems that have historically been at odds with their humanity. Instead, teachers should seek to understand why these young people resist these social systems in the first place and learn what it is about gang culture that young bangers may find affirming and validating. This has the greatest potential to assist teachers in urban communities teach their most resistant students. Our focus should remain in creating praxis and pedagogies that point their righteous indignation in a direction that allows them to continue to bang on the system. As far as we are concerned, this is one important way to nurture seeds of, and (re)imagine, transformational resistance.