Abstract
The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption opens at a violence prevention rally. This is the kind of event with which we who study the lives of poor black boys and men are all too familiar. Some denouncement of violence by a public figure. Some commitment to “stop the senseless killing”, as if people who shoot other people do not have a reason to do so, or that violence is random. Some call for a new kind of manhood, one based on self-respect and the care of family or community. A few weeks later, or perhaps after just a few days, someone else gets shot. Some new rally, rinse and repeat. The rally’s inclusion goes a long way in framing the book’s contributions. It captures the moral worlds of people we’ve deemed violent and the moral-ethical impulse driving how we think about violence prevention.
Jones traces the social histories of the men she follows, and the redemption work they do to curb violence in the Lower Fillmore district of San Francisco. They are part of a “crime fighting community,” but they do not have “credentials”—that is, they are not recognized as social service providers by funders or a broader professional network. There is a real tension between the “credentialed class” and the low-income workers doing street-level violence intervention. By addressing this tension, the book offers a nuanced account of crime fighting and identifies challenges that are not well covered in the broader sociological and criminological literatures.
Violence prevention hinges on a politics of redemption. No wonder the protagonist is a pastor, a reality I would have loved to see addressed more fully in the book. No wonder crime fighters draw stark lines between their work and “the street”. This is as much a moral project as it is a criminological one—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that criminological endeavors are moral projects, given that crimes and the laws that produce them are moral and therefore political projects themselves.
Jones offers a good number of theoretical concepts to test in later studies. Some men are “half and half”—engaging in street life while trying to change. Members of the crime fighting community, those without credentials, are from the streets, raising questions about what it means to “give back” in this way, or for violence prevention groups to hire “credible messengers”. They operate in the gentrifying, but still violent pockets of an unaffordable city, raising questions about urban governance, community development, and the changing urban economy, all of which are covered in the literature Jones weaves throughout the book. Lastly, these crime fighters share a message of safety and virtue, offering young shooters a new kind of masculinity. That is, they work to reimagine black manhood.
The analysis is exquisite when Jones brings us close to the young men she follows, whether through video footage, field notes, or interviews. This is demonstrated beautifully in what humanists would call a close reading of a police encounter. There is something of a dance, a set of choreographed movements between police officers and the young men they stop. Arms raise and lower. Hoodies are pulled up at the waist, exposing a boy’s belly and boxer shorts. Hands are placed on walls, on fences, on police cars, behind backs, or they are held up by some officer. The brief but aching scene displays the thousand cuts that sometimes kill these boys, and one of the ways they learn their place in the social order—Jones says the boys learn to be “professional suspects”. But what is more, we are left thinking about what it means for police officers and the young men to exist in something of a partnership. They have an unspoken language—though some words are shared. “I don’t carry weapons”, a boy assures an officer midway through the book. The officer, who must know this because so few boys the police stop ever have guns or drugs, says something in response, or maybe says nothing at all. The police finish, perhaps satisfied there were no weapons to be found. They will be back a few days later to dance with the boys again. But this dance is forced. It is a humiliation, displaying the power and the position of the dance partners. The police will always lead, and the boys who learn their place over time will follow. They must, or they will be arrested, beaten, tasered, pepper sprayed, or shot.
There is another subtext. The stop and search is normal and normative—it is frequent and sets moral understandings and expectations. And the stop is intimate and sexual, or at least it exerts a kind of sexual power. The boys can be strip searched, and they often are. Officers can place their hands on their bodies. They turn them as they will, and there is nothing the boys can do about it. The boys know that these interactions have potential for abuse, making them vulnerable in much the same way that young men just like them make unprotected young black women and girls vulnerable to assault and sexual violence (Butler, 2018; Ritchie, 2017). The police routinely stop, frisk, and assault (sexually or otherwise) women and girls too, but this experience is less well covered in the literature (Ritchie, 2017).
Jones’ work to identify the moral and gendered dimensions of crime control helps us to understand how and why the redemptive narrative has so much purchase in poor urban neighborhoods, and the moral justifications that make the police stop a viable, in fact preferred, intervention. By engaging in what we might call a moral sociology of crime and violence, Jones’ work is a contribution to any number of fields. If I were to offer a critique, I would say these moments, while rich, are fleeting. I wanted Jones to do much more with them.
There is another scene that the book builds toward that highlight its contributions while speaking to its limitations. Jones feels objectified by one of the young men. Having been stopped and frisked in the routine ways the book lays out, a boy looks to Jones, a Berkeley professor, and says, “bye sexy” as he leaves. This was a breach of decorum, perhaps even a way for the boy to momentarily escape his social position. But more than this, Jones suggests this was an exertion of power from a boy whose power (and agency) is systemically and physically compromised. Drawing from works by scholars like Paul Butler (2018) who write about the sexualization of the police stop, Jones suggests the boy was responding from his vulnerability. Boys and men are “manhandled” by the police. They live in fear of other young men with guns. They have seen many friends killed by other boys, and sometimes by police, and they are subjected to the daily humiliations of urban surveillance. The boy, according to Jones, was looking to exert power in one of the few ways that he could. This argument is plausible, but it would have been stronger had more been made of the interactions leading up it. “Bye sexy” could be read as an everyday form of domination, but I wanted to know more about how male domination is expressed in everyday life. This is a quibble that, if anything, speaks to the strengths of the book. The Chosen Ones should be read by gender scholars, urban sociologists, criminologists, and ethnographers because it raises questions like these.