Abstract
David Brotherton’s newest book, Youth Street Gangs: A Critical Appraisal, is perhaps the most significant sophisticated work thus written on the conceptualization, theoretical analysis, and methodological study of gangs. Indeed, while the topic of this book focuses exclusively on urban street gangs, the blueprint for urban ethnographic research Brotherton lays out sets the benchmark for all serious scholarly research on and in urban communities. This is the sort of book that should make every earnest researcher in our field stop and go back to reassess their own work, in order to verify that they have not fallen into any of the conceptual, theoretical, and/or methodological pitfalls that Brotherton so clearly elucidates. I certainly did.
Drawing on his proliferous decades of experience as an urban ethnographer in the “edge work” tradition, studying gangs and the marginalized communities in which they emerge, from San Francisco to Sao Paolo and Brooklyn to Barcelona, Brotherton offers a deft and systemic critique of hackneyed mainstream academic perspectives on street gangs, arguing for a transformational shift in the field away from the kind of Hobbesian pathologist perspectives that have dominated mainstream research on gangs in the US and abroad, to a sincerely humanist tradition of field research, as embodied in Brotherton’s own work and the work of his apostles, myself included. However, rather than merely shedding a critical lens on the flimsy work of mainstream gang researchers, Brotherton offers a detailed comprehensive blueprint for a future cohort of urban ethnographers to abide by in our own fieldwork with gangs and gang members. As such, Brotherton wrote this book with future fieldworkers, practitioners, and students as the intended audience, rather than focusing his attention exclusively on a privileged cabal of professional academics who have deliberately elevated themselves high in the ivory tower, and far from the streets.
Following his dear friend and colleague, the late Jock Young, Brotherton unleashes a barrage of devastating critiques against the kind of positivistic obtuse research that dominates and plagues contemporary research on gangs in the criminological field, particularly in the United States. He systematically dismantles each of the pillars of the mainstream late Chicago School-style research that dominates the study of crime in the US, from its insistence on estranged detachment from sanitized research subjects, to its slavish devotion to positivistic quantitative methodologies, to its incessant pursuit of an imaginary generalizability, to its pathological conceptions of gangs that only serve to further criminalize the most marginalized populations in our society rather than empower them to survive and resist their plight in a racist, classist, xenophobic society. Brotherton courageously demands an end to the practice of blaming gang members for their own condition, when so much of their lives and circumstances are outside of their control. Instead of conceptualizing agency in gang members as a means to blame the victim and justify a punitive campaign against them, Brotherton argues for a conceptualization of the agency of marginalized criminalized populations as a means to empower them, and as a means for them to empower themselves, in order to resist their continued subjugation and ultimately survive the primitive social conditions of post-modern society.
Such a humanistic perspective as Brotherton presents can be considered radical, only because marginalized peoples resisting their continued subjugation is a radical idea in Western society, which is predicated on the domination and subjugation of colonized peoples the world over. This fundamental class critique is deeply embedded within Brotherton’s analysis throughout the length of the book. He argues for a historically situated understanding of gangs and gang members in their own contexts according to their own perspectives, an understanding that can only be achieved by earning the closest most genuine relationships possible with one’s research population and by employing multiple methodologies in order to understand their community as thoroughly as possible. This requires an active field researcher who is not just interested in, but moreover, deeply and personally involved in the lives of their subject community. Rather than being an outsider looking in from above with a colonial gaze, Brotherton advocates striving for genuine insider status by sincerely taking part in the lives of community members, while simultaneously being transparent about what perspective and personal history the researcher is coming from themselves.
Perhaps most revolutionary is Brotherton’s call for a seemingly unthinkable transition from a desistance model of gang intervention to a transformational model of gang intervention. While the most punitive and the most progressive of researchers in the field alike have ultimately come up with only one solution to gang violence, desistance from gang membership, Brotherton offers an almost unconceivable alternative to the pathologists: transforming street gangs into politically conscious socially active grass-roots street organizations collectively resisting inequality and injustice in their communities and beyond. Brotherton boldly argues for a gang intervention strategy that embeds researchers and practitioners in communities to enable them to help realize the potential of the inherent agency gang members possess, in order to employ the intrinsic strength of their organizational cohesion to be a positive influence on their communities instead of a negative one.
Brotherton doesn’t just imagine this utopia of his own accord, but cites concrete examples of gang communities transforming from criminality and conflict, to social activism and community empowerment, from the radical civil rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s like the Black Panthers, to the modern Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation he has worked so closely with for over 20 years now, from New York City, to Barcelona, Spain to Genoa, Italy and now most recently Quito, Ecuador. David Brotherton is a true public sociologist and international intellectual of the first order and not only his genius, but the sincere and genuine relationship he has had with the communities he has worked with over the years ought to be apparent to anyone capable of recognizing it in this pivotal work.
Brotherton concludes with a call to arms of sort, exhorting future researchers to strive for a holistic historically embedded analysis that not only accounts for all the varying phenomena available, but moreover, seeks to ask not, “What is?”, but to boldly ask, “What could be?” We can only hope that a future cohort of gang researchers are brave enough to answer that call.