Annotated Bibliography #3

Binyam Sirmollo 4/10/08

Carroll, Rebecca. “Latisha: Fourteen; Portland, Oregon.” Sugar in the raw New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.

In this chapter, Latisha talks about how each gang represent themselves. It is easy to tell when a person is in the gang by their clothing. Each gang as a color that represent their gang. For example, the Crips use blue and the Bloods use red. Each color means something to the gang members. The gangs also have their own language with their style and English in it. The Crips and Bloods have had a war since the 1960’s. Wearing a gang color is dangerous because you can be attacked by other gang members even though you are not in a gang. Young youth join different kind of gangs because they did not have a father figure guiding them the right way. That happened to Latisha’s brothers because they did not have their father figure around them. The argument that the author is making in this chapter is that it can be a bad decision to wear gang colors even though the person is not in a gang. Gangs are different than regular person when it comes to dressing and to the language they speak.

This chapter is useful because it provides evidence on how gang’s members dress and talk and it explains the best way to stay out of trouble from the gangs. The author seems biased about how any person can be in trouble for wearing one gang color. “You gotta be careful, too, because if you’re wearing one of those colors, you can get in real trouble. Even if you are not gang-affiliated and you are wearing either red or blue, you can be identifying as gang-affiliated even if you don’t want to be.” The author does not like the idea of people getting hurt for wearing the clothes they want, and feels like it should be reported to police. This is a good book because it has a lot of facts about each gang. Every reader should believe this book because this book is being experienced and it makes it interesting. This book seems true because what people read is what they see on the streets.