Crips And Bloods: Made In America

Serving as a reminder of South Central Los Angeles’ African American civil rights riots, Stacy Peralta’s 2008 Crips and Bloods: Made in America explores the tipping points that caused generations of psychologically oppressed and confined black youth of LA to change their tactics and methods of warfare in order survive by questioning the Los Angeles Police Department’s historical background towards the rise of gang culture. This documentary follows a timeline of the evolution of gang violence from three former Slauson gang members and now activists – Ron, Bird, and Kumasi – and their accounts of the external factors that influenced black youth to turn to gangs. Ultimately, Crips and Bloods: Made in America is about the generational shift of gang

The film recreates Los Angeles in the early 1950’s for the young soon to be Slauson founding fathers – constant neglect and exclusion from primarily white organizations. Regular rejection by white fraternities prompted the black youth to create their own. With no place to develop their own sense of identity, gang culture offered a newfound sense of belonging and safety that was otherwise out of reach. The Los Angeles Police Department was a predominant advocator for the perceived criminality of African Americans: monitoring invisible, social barriers and questioning those who veered from those supposed boundaries. Kumasi describes the typical African American man west of Alameda Street as a walking time bomb, “the question was upon whom,” he