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When I grow up… I want to join a gang
When I grow up… I want to join a gang
by Ivan Sanchez
This is a public service announcement to all millionaire gang members – “Stop brainwashing our youth you ignorant bastards!”
This goes out to Baby from Cash Money Records with your big red star tattoo on your head, talking about, “keeping it blood all day,” while your son (Lil Wayne) is locked up on Rikers Island for gun charges.
You better hope no REAL Bloods decide to pull Lil Weezy’s card on the island for flying a false flag… Better yet, you better hope no Crips decide to take his little 105 pound frame for a test drive for claiming Bloods.
Baby… How does it feel to join a gang in your 30’s? I thought that was something we did in our preteens to find acceptance, protection, camaraderie, family, etc.?
Yet you’ve joined after becoming a successful business man…
You mean to tell me with your tens of millions of dollars in houses, cash, cars and jewelry you haven’t found the acceptance you were looking for?
Because you damn sure weren’t a Blood three or four years ago. And neither was Weezy when he was flying a Crip flag in his early music videos… Did he just get tired of the color blue and decide he liked red more?
And by the way, how much did you guys have to pay for your initiation or affiliation into the Bloods? Because something tells me you weren’t jumped in or sexed in… at least I’m hoping not the latter.
This letter also goes out to the Dipset, specifically Jim Jones and Juelz Santana for introducing the Bloods to Harlem in much the same way Nicky Barnes introduced heroin to the community in the 60’s and 70’s.
Your lies and deception are killing our youth on a daily basis you ignorant bastards!
Honestly, please explain to me how you live with yourselves each day knowing your glorification of a violent lifestyle kills
teens every single day?
Teens that look up to your level of success only to find you wearing “white face” and modern day woolly wigs, gloves and tailcoats… dancing for your masters at the record labels.
You keep dancing for the destruction of Black and Latino youths you silly bastards. Just keep shucking and jiving all the way to the nearest bank.
And I’ll keep going to the community centers to try to grief counsel the teens actually experiencing the pain of living this gang lifestyle.
I’ll keep jumping out of my truck in the South Bronx, breaking up violent fistfights like the one I saw this afternoon. A fight in which six girls were beating one girls head into the concrete pavement until blood began gushing from her head.
It took a bus driver, myself and two other grown men two minutes to stop the attack. And it’s scenes like these playing out in cities across the US that make my blood boil at the glorification of gangs and street violence.
We made it so cool to behave like this… until we’re staring at all that blood… listening to all that screaming… then it’s not so cool anymore.
Honestly, the least any of you can do since you profit off the death of your own is send flowers to the funeral homes… and while you’re at it send a card that reads… “I’m sorry I killed you kid… but I got a nice new Bentley out of it…’
Correct me if I’m wrong… but I’m a firm believer that if you actually lived through the street wars of the 80’s and 90’s you’d have a certain respect for the realities inflicted upon our communities due to this type of lifestyle.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t a lot of the real gangsters who did fifteen to twenty years and are now coming home, now trying to help the youth avoid those pitfalls, not live up to them.
I don’t respect anyone who glorifies the gang life as if it’s a badge of honor that should be represented to the fullest…
I don’t believe any of you have ever sincerely stood over the coffin of a teenager lost well before his time. And if you did stand over the coffin, you might as well have spit on the cold body with the behavior you’re all exemplifying these days and passing off as real.
Because that’s exactly what you’re all doing… spitting on the graves of all those killed in gang violence due to their circumstance.
And the only thing real about it… is how really damn pathetic it is that anyone who considers themselves a real man would pass this off as the right way to live your life.
The sad thing is you all do it with big smiles on your faces and even bigger chains dangling around your necks.
Funny that this new form of slavery comes in diamond and platinum… although much more appealing to the eye, they are still chains of slavery… this time mental slavery!
Tell me fellas (millionaire gangbangers) when will enough be enough with this type of sick ignorance. An ignorance that has us killing ourselves in a never-ending cycle, all in the name of financial success for a very select few?
The fact that Dipset, Cash Money and so many others have so heavily pushed gangs into our streets, schools and homes is one of the greatest mocharys of Hip Hop’s storied history.
It’s nothing less than a crime against humanity… and a crime against ones own race.
And I personally – yet again – am at a loss as to why it hasn’t been addressed by the elders of Hip Hop and those respected in our communities.
Of course Bill Cosby has tried by presenting The Cosnarati: State of Emergency featuring Supa Nova Slom, Jace the Great and Brother Hahz. But it cost him a war of words with Russell Simmons and many others.
Underground rap phenomenon NY OIL has made some of the most controversial records of our time dealing with the death of our community at the hands of these rappers. Most notably “Ya’ll Should All Get Lynched…”
Of course, the song and video is too truthful to ever get mainstream attention… the truth hurts way too much.
This open letter is addressed to all those men over 21 who have now grown up and decided to join gangs.
I don’t respect you… you’re all clowns to me… thank you for making this world a circus of death.
They’re not laughing with us… they’re laughing at us!
Ivan Sanchez is the author of Next Stop: Growing up Wild-Style in the Bronx (Touchstone – Simon & Schuster, 2008). The book is the first memoir released by a major publishing house written by a Puerto Rican from the Bronx. Sanchez is also the co-author of It’s Just Begun: The Epic Journey of DJ Disco Wiz, Hip Hop’s First Latino DJ (powerHouse, 2009). He was awarded the National Novel honors for his first fiction offering and is currently working on several new books about NY Latinos. He is also the co-host of Rebel Radio on Urban Latino Radio.