In 1927 University of Chicago sociologist Frederic Thrasher became the first academic visitor to ‘gangland’. Thrasher described gangs, from children's playgroups to adult rum-runners, as the product of second-generation immigrants living in interstitial areas and struggling with issues of adjustment. Since then, the literature on American street gangs has grown voluminously and can be loosely organized into four categories. The first continued the Chicago School tradition and placed gangs, although not necessarily immigrant ones, within the social ecology of urban neighbourhoods. The second reflected the more conservative, consensus-style politics of the late 1950s and stressed the deviant nature of gangs and the psychopathic personalities of their members. The publication of Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin's Delinquency and Opportunity in 1960 marked a turning point in scholarship. The authors still emphasized the deviant nature of street gangs, but motivated by the re-discovery of poverty in America, they understood gangs as a response to an unjust social structure. Scholars in this tradition de-emphasized individual personality traits and stressed instead the role of social inequality, and later, deindustrialization in producing gangs. Finally, scholars more recently have reflected the influence of cultural studies and have discussed gangs as forms of resistance, especially to racism, and placed American street gangs in an international, or occasionally, transnational context; discussion of individual deviance has virtually disappeared. Where sociologists might see these approaches to gangs as belonging to different theoretical traditions, an historian would argue that the structure of gangs has changed over time and/or place these interpretations of gangs in the intellectual context of their historical moments.

The three books reviewed here all understand gangs in the context of race. John Hagedorn is explicit about rejecting his former structuralist position, noting that his theoretical schema ‘is more cultural than structural and looks to existential rebellion, not broken families or jobless landscapes, to understand gangs’ social behavior’ (p. 134). In a globalized economy in which markets strip communities and even nation-states of power, and where the modernist faith in progress has proved unfounded, the dispossessed express their resistance through ethnic, communal and religious identities. Hagedorn ambitiously links youth rebellions in barrios, ghettos and favelas across the developed and developing world, which is both the strength and the greatest weakness of his book. Hagedorn makes a convincing case for the importance of identity politics. In the industrialized world, young Latinos and African Americans in US cities and Muslims in European ones are economically redundant and spatially and socially marginalized. Their marginality, like that of young people in the developing world, leaves the cultural realm as the only potential arena of contestation. Hip-hop, Hagedorn argues, is shared across the globe and provides both an expression of discontent and a potential rallying point for social mobilization.

Very little of this, however, has to do with gangs per se. Hagedorn insists that traditional definitions of gangs are Eurocentric and cannot account for the wealth of forms that youth groups take in the modern world. He argues that gangs, child soldiers in Africa, criminal organizations in Latin America and drug-distributing groups in the US are similar phenomena that share hip-hop culture, existential rebelliousness and a marginal social position. Instead of considering all of these groups as gangs, Hagedorn would have been more convincing arguing that youth rebellion assumes different shapes in the face of different social structures and local traditions. Hagedorn's use of history is also problematic. Hagedorn supports his claim for the centrality of race by comparing two Chicago gangs, the African American Conservative Vice Lords and the Irish Hamburg Athletic Association (HAA). Whereas the HAA's political activities in the 1920s gave birth to generations of police officers, municipal workers and Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Vice Lords were brutally repressed when their political activity threatened the power of the Daley machine during the 1960s. But plucking two examples out of their historical contexts does not make a convincing argument. Italian, Polish, Lithuanian and other Irish gangs of the 1920s had no success comparable to that of the HAA, suggesting that mediating factors other than ‘race’ (even given how fungible that concept was in the 1920s) were involved with the HAA's institutionalization. And one can easily question whether the history of two gangs in Chicago can represent racial structures around the globe, especially in societies with different racial histories than that of the US.

Andrew Diamond also puts racial and ethnic identity formation at the centre of his account of youth in Chicago, although he locates the origin of identity politics at the beginning of the twentieth century rather than in the post-modern era. Diamond contends that young Euro-American men forged their masculine and racial identities and created distinctive youth subcultures around their encounters with the colour line. Leisure and recreational spaces, such as dance halls, movie houses and vice districts, were the key sites of interaction as youths figured out their places in a racial/ethnic hierarchy. Diamond emphasizes the generational cleavages that developed within ethnic communities as both males and females participated in youth subcultures and in public institutions, such as schools, that drew them away from their ethnic enclaves and parent cultures, and helped create a generational consciousness. Gangs in this period, despite the 1919 race riots, did not serve as representatives of defended ethnic communities, but rather youths acted semi-autonomously to work out issues of identity. However, over time this pattern changed. In the 1940s, a ‘racial consensus’ emerged among whites that ‘transcended the world of youths’ (p. 157) as white neighbourhoods resisted integration in the face of a rapidly expanding black population. White gangs enjoyed at least tacit adult support in fire-bombing the houses of African Americans and served as the agents of communal violence that other scholars have described. By the end of the 1950s, Diamond argues, an even broader sense of whiteness developed that was no longer tethered to the defence of particular communities, and provided the foundation for the growth of the white power movement in the late 1960s.

Diamond employs the concept of racial ‘alterity’ to discuss how Chicago's Puerto Rican and Mexican gangs struggled to adapt themselves to a binary racial system. While Mexican and Puerto Rican groups were at times allied, Mexicans more frequently identified with whiteness and both groups especially after the 1960s forged distinctive communal identities that militated against inter-ethnic alliances. African American gangs engaged in a dialectic with their white counterparts. Black gangs defended their communities against marauding whites, asserted control over black leisure spaces and created a fighting gang subculture in the 1950s that encompassed large swathes of Chicago's black communities. Diamond notes, ‘the politicization of black identity went hand in hand with the politicization of white identity’ (p. 226) and African American gangs eventually participated in school boycotts and protests against job, housing and other forms of discrimination. The Civil Rights movement successfully engaged African American gangs, at least for a time, but gangs responded more enthusiastically to Black Power, rooted in beliefs in community control and militant defence against attack, that echoed the gang experience. Through this politicization, gang members discovered their ‘historicity’, Diamond argues, and directly engaged the power of the state. The focus on racial formation in gangland, however, has its limits. It cannot explain why conflict among gangs occurred more frequently along intra-racial lines than across them, or the ability of an African American gang to include a few white members, or vice versa, which signalled flexibility in the understanding of race.

Diamond is far better at explaining youth behaviour than at analysing gangs. Diamond defines gangs as ‘formal or casual organizations of teenage boys and young men’ (p. 69), but this includes virtually any collection of adolescents whatever their number, level of organization or self-identity as a group. This allows Diamond to shift focus repeatedly between youth and gangs, but it becomes impossible to distinguish gang activity from broader actions undertaken by youth: surely Diamond does not mean to imply that all youths belonged to gangs. What, then, was the significance of gang membership? Under what circumstances did youths organize into more formal gangs? And why did gang nations emerge in some cities, such as Chicago, when they did not in others?

Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day is the third book to emerge from his study of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. Written for a popular audience, the book lacks the usual scholarly apparatus, but readers of Venkatesh's other work will recognize his sources and intellectual heritage. Venkatesh is rooted in the Chicago tradition of careful community study, but he is first and foremost attuned to the continuing significance of race. Venkatesh explores the social life and underground economy of the projects, which were abandoned by public authorities, ignored or exploited by mainstream institutions and shaped by a drug-dealing street gang, the ‘Black Kings’. Venkatesh argues that distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate and criminal and legal are nonsensical in the ghetto economy, where residents must share resources regardless of their origin.

The Black Kings were vertically integrated – much as gangs in Thrasher's day – and had some connections to Chicago's politicians. However, the gang could not prevent the implosion of the Robert Taylor Homes, completed in 2007, which destroyed the social ecology that sustained it. National housing policy focused on replacing high-rise projects with mixed-income low-rise developments, and local real estate interests, gentrifiers, and Mayor Richard M. Daley seized on the opportunity to remake the South Side. As the high-rises began to fall so did the gang as customers, kin and members scattered. Where Hagedorn and Diamond see the potential for politicized gangs, Venkatesh presents the Black Kings more ambiguously. The Kings were an organic part of their community, but they were primarily interested in making money. Rhetoric aside, much of their community work seemed self-serving, offering more the illusion of service than its substance, and presenting no real challenge to the social order. The Black Kings provided a mechanism for individual mobility, not community empowerment.

The Black Kings look somewhat similar to the generations of white gangs that preceded them. White gangs were integrated relatively well into neighbourhood political and criminal organizations, and organized crime found its ablest recruits from neighbourhood street gangs. In the 1960s, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Chinese assumed greater control over illegal enterprise in their communities, and they too recruited their workforce from neighbourhood gangs. Crime was, in Daniel Bell's words, a queer ladder of social mobility, and any analysis of gangs has to take this into account. Organized crime was the form of capitalist enterprise that penetrated most deeply into the daily lives and consciousness of the dispossessed. Pimps, dope dealers, gamblers and the gang members who aspired to emulate them may have found racial politics appealing, but they also kept their eyes on the main chance.