Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
Bezig met laden... The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dreamdoor Randol Contreras
Geen Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Prijzen
Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980's, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insider's look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as "Stickup Kids," these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robbery's violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeen
Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)363.4509747Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Other social problems and services Drugs, Abortion, Pornography Illegal drugs Illegal drugs - subdivisions Illegal drugs - by placeLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |
Contreras argues that the robbers were ultimately motivated by the same ideologies that motivated Wall Street bankers (greed is good!) and that were celebrated by conservatives (you are responsible for yourself and only yourself). He also argues that toxic masculinity—reinforced by stays in jail—played an important role in the choices that they saw available to them. Also, the men he dealt with looked down on women, for much the same reasons, considering them all fundamentally degraded and buyable—whereas Contreras considers the fact that women were attracted to his money-dropping friends a way of trying to make the best of very limited options.
It’s a gripping and saddening read, and includes graphic accounts of the torture his subjects inflicted on their victims. Ostensibly dealers couldn’t give in without torture because, if they did, their suppliers would assume they’d participated in a fake robbery to cheat the suppliers. Often, the robbers were clued in by an associate of the dealer, but they had to pretend not to know where the drugs and money were in order to prevent implicating the associate, again meaning that torture was required. To justify themselves, the robbers blamed the victims, said that they were no different from corrupt police, and distinguished between the professional torturers who did only what was required and the amateurs who went overboard. Both among dealers and robbers, “[d]ouble-crossing was the norm”—Contreras reports incidents that sound like TV show storylines, where the men debate whether it’s simpler to murder a robbery partner or pay him his share, and then greet the partner with hugs and good wishes.
The male robbers worked with an attractive, underpaid “girl” in order to get an entrée into a dealer’s place or to get the dealer to brag about important details; though dealers were suspicious of men, especially when she approached them in front of other men, “[t]he girl meant potential sex in a bedroom, an alley, or rooftop. The sex meant demonstrating manliness to peers.… [T]hese drug robbers set what I call a masculinity trap, a play on a male’s manhood to victimize him…. A lone woman buying marijuana from a street peddler is perceived to be open to sex: she is bold (no male accompanies her).” ( )