Word of what looks like gang violence at NC A&T — two freshmen say they were attacked for the colors they were wearing on campus.
According to the story, A&T police Chief Richard Holden said he has not seen any “definitive evidence of gang activity” on campus.
“Definitive evidence” isn’t always easy to come by — and of course any college campus has to deal with outsiders coming in and making trouble. But since doing some gang reporting in Greensboro over the summer I’ve been to the campus of A&T and seen some of the students there sporting gang colors and throwing up gang signs just as prominently as the gang bangers I interviewed in Greensboro’s housing projects. I’ve seen it at my own alma mater, UNCG, as well.
I’m not talking about people who happen to be wearing a red shirt or blue Chuck Taylors, who happen not to be wearing what we think of as the traditional collegiate uniform. I’m talking about people swathed in colors from head to toe – bandannas, shirts, pants, shoes and socks. There’s a danger in lumping together anyone who doesn’t dress like everyone else — but there’s also a sort of conspicuous gang uniform that becomes easy to identify after you’ve seen it just a few times.
The trouble with identifying who the “real” gang members are, as gang cops, community leaders and gang experts will tell you, is that in the communities most vulnerable to gang recruitment and gang violence kids emulate gang clothing styles, throw up signs even if they’re not really “down” or try to claim affiliation simply because their favorite rapper (Snoop and The Game prominently, others less so) represents for one crew or another.
I’m spending most of today at the Youth First Teen Summit at the Greensboro Coliseum, where kids are getting together to talk about the positive things they can do in their communities and one of the big draws is Wes Daily, Executive Director Emeritus of the East Coast Gang Investigators Association.
Daily hasn’t gone on yet, but so far I’ve been surprised at how surprised I am by some of the very simple things the organizers have to tell the kids.
“Smile,” one speaker told a student he’d called up to the front during a presentation. “Stop trying to look so hard.”
The kid did, indeed, look like he was about to be in a fistfight. And he was among friends, in a safe place, talking about positive things. But he didn’t want to look soft.
These are some of the cultural problems and challenges that we all have to deal with — black, white, rich, poor or middle class — in a city that’s gang problem is now front and center.
When I was reporting on gangs over the summer people kept reminding me that the gang phenomenon wasn’t just happening in the hood — that middle class and well-off kids are involved in it too.
The proof of that is, I guess, that it’s frankly no longer shocking to me that gang violence can happen on college campuses in Greensboro.
1 Comment
August 2, 2009 at 7:07 pm
ok here is my opinion on this, i think that this is a very informational site and i wished to know if any gangs located in north carolina wore the color pink as their gang color.