The appeal of gang memberships never really made sense to me. Neither has understanding the fear of gang members. Here's why.
I grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, a safe and nice town, kind of like a suburb but there wasn't a big city anywhere near us. As vanilla as this spot was, the kids in town still claimed to be in gangs. Also, I grew up in the early 90's, when gangsta rap on MTV peaked.
So obviously the gangs started copying what they saw on the tube. Soon we had our own tribe of Raiders who wore LA Raiders gear. But they needed a rival, so the White Sox popped up. If you can guess, they wore Chicago White Sox gear. And there always needs to be an "also ran," so the Kings formed, sporting LA Kings gear (that's the hockey team in LA—if you're from LA, you've probably never heard of them or the sport called hockey, but I digress).
Now some of these things are exactly like the other? Can you guess which? If you're a sports fan, you'll know that every single team—Raiders, Kings and White Sox—all claim black as their color. So instead of Bismarck's underworld being ruled by the Crips in blue and the Bloods in red, it was all kids in black.
I've been conditioned to think all gang members are pussies. So if you were to walk to middle school wearing a black t-shirt and some white kid pulled up in his hot 1990 Honda Civic and yelled, "Yo homes. What hood you from?" and you answered as I did when I was twelve years old, "Highland Acres. Right across the street from the preschool," usually the gangster would yell, "Poser! Quit wearing black! Poser!" Then drive away.
Now, the irony of some white kid who's seen too many Ice Cube videos calling anybody else in the world a "poser" was generally lost on our gang population. Actually, most of the time all they did was hang around public places acting tough. Maybe a few of them smoked Marlboro Reds or drank Old English forties. The gangs may have run drugs. They certainly didn't run guns, because it was North Dakota; at some restaurants, they'd give you a free Uzi for finishing the 78-ounce steak.
Because of the Gangs of Bismarck, I've been conditioned to think all gang members are pussies (which in many cases, isn't too far from the truth). When I moved to New York and some guy said, "Yo man, I'm a Chinese Triad," I shrugged a shoulder and told him, "Awesome. I'll take General Tsao's chicken please."
So that's how I formed my badass attitude that kept me breathing on the mean streets of Bismarck. And that's also how I'm going to end up on the wrong end of a bullet for not "respecting" a gang member.