Crips & Bloods: Made In America

[March 11th, 2009]

So the timeliness of this gangland documentary arriving in Portland should go without saying, and a Neighborhood Watch Association could view it with a checklist in hand. Shootings in the streets? Check. Shootings in retaliation for previous shootings? Check. Shootings inside of churches during funerals for young men dead from shootings? There’s a riot goin’ on!

Such hand wringing about the rise of gang activity traditionally combines equal parts racial panic and blame deflection. What marks director Stacy Peralta’s turf is his dedication to undermining these reflexes. Crips & Bloods: Made in America is a drastic reorientation—it opens with a helicopter shot of Los Angeles seen upside down, and every time it is threatened by stock opinions, it swoops away for a contextualizing angle. Peralta, who helmed the skateboarding history Dogtown and Z-Boys, has enough confidence in his knowledge of South Central L.A. that he waits nearly 30 minutes before introducing a single Blood or Crip. For that crucial first third of the film, he instead concentrates on the pent-up rage of South Central neighborhoods, which exploded into the 1965 Watts riots. “Here’s a dilapidated building,” remembers one participant. “You didn’t fix it, you didn’t remove it. It ain’t nothing but a pile of bricks anyhow. That’s coming at you. That whole building, brick by brick, that’s coming at your ass.”

Pimped-out jump cuts and soundtrack scratches are also hurled at the screen, but Peralta’s flashy pacing belies what is essentially an attempt at deglamorizing a pathetic lifestyle. Crips & Bloods paints gang warfare as civil uprising that curdled and collapsed into self-destruction, with kids turned into community-destroying soldiers. This explanation is incomplete—I could have done with a little less bemoaning of the penitentiary system and a little more examination of how entire generations of black men grew up without fathers—but it points in the right direction. African-Americans destroying each other is a sick national wish-fulfillment. Block access to jobs, enact minimum-sentencing laws, build more jail cells, be afraid of black thugs invading your city: This catalog should be familiar to Portland’s concerned citizens as well. If the Crips and the Bloods are about to have a “Made in Oregon” tag on them, we can’t say we didn’t do our best to deserve it.