Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  “Tyshon was not an innocent boy,” says Regina, one of Tyshon’s mother’s best friends, who says she knew Tyshon “before he was even thought of.” “He did burglary, sold drugs, he killed people. He had power in the street. He really did. Especially for such a young kid. He had power. A lot of people were intimidated by him, and they were scared of him. I know he had bodies under his belt.” If I’d chosen another day, I could well have been reporting on one of Tyshon’s victims.

  Tributes following his passing blend a sense of loss at his death with a moral ambivalence about his life. Like a soldier slain in combat, expressions of lament are framed with the understanding that such a tragic outcome was, at the very least, an occupational hazard. “You live by the sword, you die by the sword,” says Regina. “He lived by the guns and the gangs and the streets, and that’s how he died. It was sad to see him laying there at the funeral. I seen him grow up and I loved him and I know he could be a good kid. But there ain’t no point in sugarcoating it. He was a bad kid too.”

  Many of the messages on his Facebook page took the form of elegies—literally poetic farewells. There’s one from his elder sister, Kiyana:

  You’re not the devil you just went along with his game.

  But an Angel I still pray to God you became.

  Bad decisions everyone makes,

  But never did I believe for them

  Your life they’d take.

  And one from his friend Chris:

  It seem like just the other day we was chilling having fun

  Now my Lil Homie gone from another with a gun

  how many more can I take I tell you right now it’s none

  the ones who did it I hope they die aint no biting my Damn tongue

  GANGS ARE NEITHER NEW nor racially specific. From the Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Puerto Rican gangs of New York to the Mafia, various types of informal gatherings of mostly but not exclusively young men have long been part of Western life. They often connect the social, violent, entrepreneurial, and criminal. And although they involve a relatively small minority, it amounts to a significant number of people. According to the National Youth Gang Survey, in 2012 in the United States there were around thirty thousand gangs and over eight hundred thousand gang members20—roughly the population of Amsterdam. The terms of membership and rules of engagement differ, as do the perceived benefits, depending on the context. Some people join through fear; others to instill fear in others; some identify just enough to keep below the radar or, like Edwin, associate for the sake of social status. Many aren’t really clear why they join; like many teenagers they just blow with the winds that are guiding their friends. Some don’t join at all; as was pointed out earlier they are “gang-related” for the simple reason that in the neighborhoods where they live gangs are dominant and there’s no way to avoid them.

  “Joining a gang is free,” says Bautista, the community organizer. “There are parks around here, but they’re underserved, understaffed, and under-resourced. They’re taking down a lot of the basketball courts. If you don’t have money there’s very few options to do something thrilling.”

  What is new is that in recent years gangs have become more deadly than ever. According to the National Youth Gang Survey, between 2007 and 2012 gang membership rose 8 percent, and gang-related homicides leapt 20 percent.21 The principal reason why gang activity has become more deadly, it seems, is because of the availability of guns. Studies of Los Angeles County between 1979 and 1994 revealed that the proportion of gang incidents involving guns that ended in homicide leapt from 71 percent to 95 percent.22 “The contrast with the present is striking,” argued sociologist Malcolm Klein after reaching a similar conclusion in Philadelphia and East Los Angeles. “Firearms are now standard. They are easily purchased or borrowed and are more readily available than in the past.”23

  But as brutal as they are, gangs can also offer a sense of community and purpose in a situation where neither seems attainable. “School failure, unemployment, and family dysfunction tear at the shreds of a young person’s self-esteem,” writes Deborah Prothrow-Stith, former Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Health and coauthor of Deadly Consequences: How Violence Is Destroying Our Teenage Population and a Plan to Begin Solving the Problem.24 “Gang membership balms these wounds.” Gangs, she argues, can be places where young men feel they are valued and where a willingness to fight to defend yourself and others compensates for your inability to find a job and mature into more traditional masculine roles.

  They become like family, taking under their wing at a young age those who appear vulnerable and giving them a sense of camaraderie and an identity that might otherwise be lacking. “For many a poor boy the most perceptible difference between the streets and home is that home is danger and squalor with a blanket and a roof,” writes James Baldwin in The Evidence of Things Not Seen.25 Despite several attempts I could not reach Tyshon’s mother or anybody else in his house. But according to Regina, however rough the streets were, they offered Tyshon more than his home life ever could.

  “Sometimes [his mother] never came out of her room for days,” she said. “And she kept having kids. And the kids had to fend for themselves. . . . So they had to get out in the streets. They had to find their own food to steal. They had to do whatever they had to do to survive. So those kids had a rough life.

  “The older gangbangers, they saw that and they took advantage of that. They made him think that they loved him. They gave him $100 here and $100 there. And he thought, ‘Oh, these people love me. So I’m gonna follow these people in the street. I’m not gonna listen to her.’ So they used him. They knew that kids wouldn’t go to jail long. They knew they wouldn’t be tried as adults. The streets did that. He turned to the streets because he couldn’t go home and call it home. So he was basically a street kid.”

  THE KEY TO CHALLENGING the fatal consequences of gang culture, Dr. Slutkin, from Cure Violence, tells me, lies in treating violent crime like a disease and changing the norms in the worst-affected neighborhoods to prevent its transmission. “We need to interrupt the spread, change the script, change the behavior, and change the norms,” he says.

  Cure Violence does a great deal of public education, often in concert with local clergy, to organize communities against gun violence. It also has a team of “violence interrupters.” These are often ex-offenders and former gang members embedded in the community who try to broker truces or who will go to the emergency room when a victim is hospitalized and persuade family members not to retaliate.

  I went out with the interrupters in Englewood, one of the neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side where gun violence has been most rampant. (They do not operate in South Chicago, where Tyshon lived and died.) It was early in the fall of 2014 and late in the afternoon, and as we patrolled the streets by car there were signs of life and death. The weather was good and people were out—sitting on the stoop, kids playing basketball, older folks playing cards and having cookouts. For an area renowned for gun crime, the mood was incredibly relaxed. But every few blocks, some graffiti or an arrangement of flowers and cards marked the spot where somebody had fallen. And since both of my chaperones had grown up in the area, on many blocks they, too, inevitably had stories about some drama involving a shooting.

  Herein lies one of the paradoxes of high-crime areas. The communities are, in many senses, engaged and tight. It is the very nature of life in poor areas such as these that the residents have trouble escaping them. So those who remain know each other well, and over the summer months social life spills out onto the streets. Teens and adults gather on porches and stoops, kids run from house to house, and extended families, connected by endless permutations of baby mamas, baby daddies, and “uncles” and “aunts” who have no biological connection (informal family structures familiar to me from my Barbadian family), reach out to each other.

  On the other hand, these areas are ripped apart by violence and poverty. Stray bullets aside, the shooters and the shot often know each oth
er. And the boundaries of the community, like most boundaries, are arbitrary, heavily enforced, and inevitably porous. Make friends in school with someone who lives two blocks over, flirt with someone on a different street, or wear the wrong-color T-shirt on a walk to the store and, like Pedro in San Jose, you could be putting your life on the line.

  JC (not his real name), one of the interrupters I was riding with, described the situation that weekend as “hot.” Nine people had been shot in Englewood the previous afternoon. One of them, Deandre Ellis, twenty-two, was sitting in the “first chair” of the Suitable Barber and Beauty Salon getting his hair cut when a man dressed all in black came in and sprayed the room with gunfire, killing him and wounding two others.26

  “I found that this beef going on started behind a female,” he said. “These guys went to school together, and once upon a time they were cool together. It’s a touchy situation now because there’s bodies on the ground.”

  So JC and Jamal (not his real name) drive the streets they grew up in, stopping occasionally to talk to family, people they know, and people they were in prison with. As we cruise around, young men look up just long enough to get a measure of the vehicle, in case it means trouble, and then return to their conversations on stoops and corners. The police are also cruising the neighborhood. At one point we see them line up several young men against a building; the officers make the men place their hands on the wall and spread their legs as they pat them down. Nobody knows where the next shot is coming from or whom it’ll be aimed at. But everybody knows it’s coming.

  “We drive around critical hotspots,” says JC. “We see someone that’s connected to the block who can give us some details about what took place last night, and we put that together with a lot of other information and try and stop things before it starts. We go to talk to these high-risk guys one on one.”

  Who’s high risk? “A high-risk guy would be a known weapon carrier who’s known for hurting somebody,” he continues. “A history of violence. Someone just released from prison. Nine times out of ten someone’s in war right now.” While we’re driving, Jamal gets a call from a woman whose “baby daddy” got killed the night before.

  The transition from prison to civilian life is particularly hard—especially if you’ve been away for a long time. Keen to reassert their status, ex-cons emerge to find that they have been forgotten. “A lot of guys come home, and there’s no employment out here for ’em,” explains Jamal. “But if you’ve been gone for a long time, then the block done change. Brothers live in the past. And they think, ‘I was the man round here ten years ago. I’m still the man.’ So he out there showing everybody I’m still that guy. That’s where the conflict come in at. People say, ‘You can’t just come here ’cos we’re already established. Your name don’t hold no weight no more.’”

  So how do they intervene in an environment as volatile and dangerous as this? It depends on the situation. Sometimes they can appeal to naked self-interest, pointing out to someone still raging over the death of a family member or gang member what is at stake for them if they act rashly. “He’s on parole,” explains Jamal. “He just got out. If he’s found with a weapon and he goes back, it’ll be ten years. And he don’t want no more of that.”

  Sometimes the roots of the conflict are so deep that the protagonists have forgotten what the fighting was originally about. And sometimes there are people you just can’t reach. “There are brothers out there just wanna shoot,” says JC. “You can talk to ’em, but that don’t mean they’re gonna listen.”

  In the past, they both agree, there was more structure and discipline to gang life than there is now. They don’t even call them gangs anymore but “cliques” (much like Stanley’s friends on Beatties Ford in Charlotte) that are loosely affiliated under the old gang labels. “Basically there ain’t no real whole blocks in Englewood no more,” they say, looking out over the vacant lots and boarded-up houses of an economically devastated community. “Just maybe five or six houses exist on one block. So it’s just cliques. They become friends, and when they get older they might do things like smoking and drinking, and that becomes your clique. A lot of the time they name themselves, sometimes after their dead homies. What’s your name?” asks Jamal. “Gary,” I say. “Say if you passed away and they might call their clique G-boy or Garyworld.”

  As we pulled back up to the Cure Violence office, dusk had arrived. “Now they’re going to the liquor store and heading out with their crew to hatch their plans for tonight,” said JC. Four people were shot and injured in Englewood that night. None died.

  TYSHON’S CLIQUE WAS CALLED Lolo World, after a fallen member who went by the name Lolo. Over the years, Tyshon graduated to a leadership position. His nemesis was Lil Herb, an accomplished rapper from neighboring South Shore from the NLMB (No Limit Muskegon Boys or Never Leave My Brothers)—a gang found on the East Side.

  Lil Herb (who later wanted to be known as G Herbo) was the same age as Tyshon. He hit the big time in 2012 with “Kill Shit,” which he recorded with Lil Bibby, before going on to record with major artists like Nicki Minaj, Chance the Rapper, and Common. In one of his songs, “Chi-Raq,” he celebrates the violence that has blighted his hometown.

  There is no evidence that Lil Herb had anything to do with Tyshon’s death. But in at least one song, RondoNumbaNine’s “Zeko Pack,” which came out six months after Tyshon was killed, he boasts about Tyshon (who also went by the name Posto) being shot. Tyshon’s clique is now called Postogang.

  IF THE STREETS RAISED Tyshon, then for much of his teenage life the prison system housed him. He had only just been released from prison that Monday. Little more than six weeks earlier, he’d been arrested for a public-peace violation and for reckless conduct after police saw him in an alley where, they claimed, the Disciples regularly shoot. When they called for him to stop, he ran away, stopping traffic on South Marquette Road, only to be chased down by eight police officers and arrested next to his house. That time he only spent one night in a cell.

  On hearing of his death, one of his Facebook friends expressed surprise, because the last time they’d seen each other, they’d been picked up by the police, and she assumed he must have been back in prison. “Last time i seen u we was together n the back of a cpd [Chicago Police Department] van the crazy part is i was going for talking shit to the police cause they was bout to try to play u they gave me a ticket n took u n i didnt even know u was out so when i got that call i wasnt even thinking of u. Then it hit me . . . u will be missed down here . . . prayers to all feeling hurt behind this . . . when will it end . . . feeling sad. . . . ”

  The pathos in this account is in the assumption that had he been in prison he would still be alive. Herein lies the brutal reality of growing up poor and black in areas like Chicago’s South Side: that two of the most likely outcomes for a black male under the age of twenty-five is prison or death—and maybe, as was the case for Tyshon, both. These aren’t options—because no one in his or her right mind would choose them. They are simply the paths most readily available, in the same way that children of privilege approaching their final year of undergraduate study are generally destined to either go on to further study or start working. True, those young university students might end up unemployed or dropping out, but if they simply float with the tide of their race and class, that’s unlikely. From career counseling to peer and parental pressure, both system and circumstance are set up for that transition.

  For black youth in low-income neighborhoods, system and circumstance are set up for an entirely different trajectory, and to escape that fate you have to both swim against the tide and hope for a lucky break. In this sense, as Regina tells it, Tyshon never really stood a chance.

  Given the life he lived it’s amazing he reached the age of eighteen. A few years earlier, he was shot in the leg on 79th Street. The first day he came out of the hospital, Regina says, he was shot again, just a couple of blocks away from the site of the first shooting. When his mom went to the
liquor store, one youth told her they weren’t going to stop until they killed him. “You his mama,” he told her. “We should kill you too.”

  Regina begged her to move. Regina had once lived with Tyshon’s family—when she was younger and had a drug problem and had to leave to straighten herself out. She went first to Indiana, then to Wisconsin, and currently lives in Iowa. She tried to convince Tyshon’s mother that she could break the cycle if she left the area and that she could save her children from worse. When his mother refused to move, Regina pleaded with her to let Tyshon come and stay with her, arguing, “There’s so much more to see than Chicago and a liquor store. C’mon now.” But she wouldn’t let him go.

  We’ve seen, in previous chapters, how the law of probabilities operates in terms of the criminal justice system, the job market, educational achievement, and so on. What is more difficult to quantify is the psychic load it brings to bear on those who are raised in such environments. “I think we need to recognize how fatalistic many teenagers, especially inner city teens, feel about violence—firearms, physical force, injury, and death are intimately known to these kids,” writes Prothrow-Stith. “Many poor, black, inner city kids are living surrounded by an amount of violence that even those of us who are experts in ‘intentional injury’ find astounding. What you and I read about in the headlines, hundreds of thousands of ordinary kids are living every day, often without protection or guidance of any adult.”27