I do get it. In spite of what you may think. However, I don't think that the gangsta attitude is because of the clothing. I think that has
more to do with the drug use and sales. Those kinds of things are immigrating from one city to another. They were in Los Angeles, in the seventies. Just starting to become a force that had to be reckoned with. Now Portland is having close to one killing a day, that is suspected to be gang related. I was living there at the time, and worked with a woman at the phone company whose cousin was one of the first that were shot by the gangs. She was a beautiful black woman, and we were very good friends at work. However as we left work one evening, her husband was picking her up. He looked at me for a very long time, and frowned, and I saw him saying something obviously angry to her, as she got into the car. From then on we were only casual, and she only spoke to me when it was almost compulsory. He had obviously been very angry to see her associating with a white woman. I didn't even ask her the problem, it was more or less, just accepted that we both understood the problem, and let it be..
I think now back on that happening, and am sorry that I was not informed enough to say something to her. It was not too long after that, the Watts Riots happened. I was suitably appauled, but at the same time, I did understand the reasons that brought that neighborhood to that end. I rode the red car through that neighborhood every day, back and forth to work. I saw the terrible poverty, and the obvious alcoholism, the whole run of problems that existed there. It was horrid. Yet the people I also noticed that rode the cars with me were a great mix. Some were well off, some were bedraggled, and some were drunk. Most were just like me. Just going back and forth to work. I am just saying what I saw. I am sure it was not the entire picture that existed there. It was just my observation from the view of a 16 yr old girl basically nieve and uneducated to those terribe issues. i had had practically no connection to black people. Never seen an alcoholic, or people standing on the street outside a liquor store, drinking in public. A few, but not many. I just saw them as people. Beautiful babies, beautiful young women, and men. Then others that were a bit scary to be around. I can't apologize for the view that I had. It was what it was. Only uneducated. I must say that I saw a large group of people overall. Some were very handsomly dressed as you spoke about, but also others that were totally not. So maybe I am admitting that I did seem to be saying it is cute to dress like hoodlums. However I think anything but that. I just don't think that the clothes people wear, make them criminals or non criminals. Mob members, and dope dealers are both able to dress in the nicest of clothes. On the other hand, the most modest of homes, without all the fancy dress, have as high a moral rate and kind wonderful people as can be found. I can say that one of my closest friends while living in Sacramento was the very
proof of that. She was on welfare, dressed ok, but far from nice, like the examples in the pictures, but she was as fine a woman, as I have ever known. In other words, i do not believe, contrary to the addage, "clothes, make the man/woman." Its his/her heart, thoughts, and behaviors that do that.
In my mind, prejudice in whatever form it takes. Anti black, anti gay, anti semite, anti hispanic or any other type, is the cause for gang behavior, or dress. Also carrying guns, and knives to places in anticipation of using them. That is a problem that should be checked. It really does hurt and maim or kill. Clothes, no matter how repugnant they may be to us in one way or another, are not really dangerous. Simply distasteful.
