DIVIDE AND CONQUER - ROBERT WEIDE

A fascinating little book about race at large as well as Los Angeles street gangs in particular. Weide is an academic who’s interested in the ways that race is weaponized as a tool to, as the title says, divide and conquer. The first few sections of the book, where he takes a sort of larger, trans-historical view, were my favorite parts. Weide is cutting and incisive about the weaponization of race and identity and how these concepts are used to break movements up into smaller, more controllable groups. As he puts it, “Identity is the consolation prize offered by capital to those for whom the capitalist economy cannot provide material circumstances or meaningful existence.” If you’ve ever been active in leftist spaces or movements, you’ve certainly seen this in action. Often it’s really bougie, college/elite POC “leaders” who seem to speak for identity groups without being connected in any real way to the most marginalized (they themselves are always quite privileged, economically and prestige-wise) members of the groups they claim to speak for. This is classic wrecker behavior and it really got weaponized during the 2020 uprisings with the “White Fragility” crowd. Basically, people who want to talk identity and not solidarity and real change. He traces this back, in my favorite section, to the US/Black Panther split, showing how one group, the Panthers, were focused on larger issues and real solutions and building across identity groups, while the US organization was focused on the dead-end of cultural nationalism. The US was, famously, deployed by the FBI to kill some prominent Panthers. Their legacy lives on in Melina Abdullah, the almost cartoonishly corrupt leader of BLM-LA who counts Karenga as a mentor. The book then gets into LA street gangs and talks about the ways in which the Latino (tho, he really only discusses Mexican gangs, don’t remember reading about MS-13 in this, thought they are quite active in LA) and Black gangs of Los Angeles interact are used by the police, both on the street and in prison, as a tool to prevent larger pan-proletariat unity. There are lots of interviews and surveys on gang member attitudes, which was pretty interesting. It was striking to me that the Mexican gangs seemed much more rigid and racist (for instance most of them reported that they could not date Black women and would hurt fellow members of their gang that did so) than the Black gangs. He also points out that only Mexicans have been charged with hate-crime enhancements for targeting Blacks for retaliation, despite both groups engaging in such activities. There is some weird, off-base stuff around the idea of trans-racial, a term he uses for racial outsiders in these gangs (like YT crips). He even coins (to my knowledge) the term cis-racial and talks about Caitlyn Jenner vs Rachel Dolezol. This is the wrong way to look at it, a YT crip is not Black, no one thinks they are, they don’t think they are, they’re just in a racially coded gang. The gender race thing is interesting but much more nuanced than he’s getting into here and honestly, the book was fine without this point. I wish there was more of the history stuff, I’d love more about the way the racial gangs were formed in prison and the role the admin in these places played in that.