Review: Bastards of the Party

This review of the HBO documentary Bastards of the Party was published in the February 16, 2007 issue of Socialist Worker. This is the uncut version.

Bastards of the Party, directed by Cle Sloan, HBO Documentaries

Bastards of the Party, a documentary film produced, directed and narrated by Cle Shaheed "Bone" Sloan, a former member of the Athens Park Bloods, traces the political history of African American street gangs in Los Angeles. The title refers to the Crips and Bloods as the "bastard children of the Black Panther Party," though Sloan's history stretches back to the Reconstruction era. He traces the evolution of violence by whites against blacks and the forms of black self-defense that evolved as a result, by interviewing current and former gang members, Black Panthers, and historians (including radical urban historian Mike Davis, whose book City of Quartz Sloan credits with inspiring the film).

For instance, Sloan shows why the LAPD's reputation for racism has deep historical roots. The last legal lynching in Los Angeles took place in 1948, and Sloan shows the gruesome images of young Black men hanging from a tree while white men and women cheer and shout. It was when lynching finally became illegal that the LAPD took over the lynch mobs' job. The police commissioner at the time set out on a campaign to recruit police officers from the Deep South-- any white Southern man with a military background had a job waiting for him in Los Angeles, and the city deliberately developed a staunchly racist police force.

In the meantime, economic and political shifts forced a certain measure of desegregation in LA's neighborhoods. White neighborhoods reacted violently to the small numbers of African American families moving in, and there was a rash of beatings and killings of black youths by white gangs-- black newspapers from the time show the police looking on in approval. Young black men began to form their own groups for self-defense. The police force looked on this as a threat and began a campaign of repression that went on for years and culminated in the Watts riots of 1965.

While the Watts riots were portrayed in the white media (and in today's history textbooks) as instances of senseless violence and looting, Sloan paints a picture of an organized uprising that still serves as an inspiring expression of Black anger and shows how the Watts community empowered itself against a racist police force.

He then traces the history of the Black Panther Party's rise not only to political prominence, but as the heart of black self-organization. One woman he interviews says, "In those days, if your husband was gonna hit you, you didn't say 'I'm going to call the police.' You said, 'I'm going to call the Black Panthers.'" The Party organized breakfast programs, sickle cell testing, political education, food pantries, and revolution-- much to the alarm of the FBI. Sloan explains the history of COINTELPRO, the FBI's anti-Left sabotage program, and shows (through an interview with a retired FBI agent who participated in COINTELPRO) how the BPP and its reformist rival, the Us Organization, were pitted against one another and eventually undone by the FBI's relentless attacks.

In the 1970s, as the BPP declined, the problems of self-organization and self-defense remained. Black youth, inspired by the Panthers' example, began their own organizations, the most influential of which was the Crips-- an acronym that initially stood for "Community Revolutionary Inter-Party Service," though in a series of political arguments the "Revolutionary" was replaced with "Reform". The Crips had a political orientation and a constitution based on that of the BPP. However, the political collapse of the New Left left the Crips under attack and without direction. And as the manufacturing economy collapsed, jobs for semi-skilled laborers disappeared, and black men were left without alternatives as the factories closed. As rival gangs began to spring up, and popular culture portrayed the movement as an apolitical way to get rich, the situation declined into pointless black-on-black violence.

Sloan does a brilliant job tracing the political origins of the drug crisis in the 1980s, from the CIA to Nicaragua to South Central, and is unrelenting in his indictment of the police. He interviews experts who explain how the police actually benefit from and rely on the existence of gang violence, which brings them equipment, federal funding, sympathy from the media and a free hand to be as repressive and violent as they like. He intersperses shots of police "gang sweeps" in South Central with shots of soldiers patrolling the peasants of Vietnam.

As the movie draws to a close, Sloan focuses on the human cost of the continued violence and broken truces. He interviews current bangers about their lives and follows them to funerals. It isn't simply about guns and drugs, one Blood explains; he describes the loss of several family members and concludes with "We ain't looking for peace. Too much slaughter." The last few minutes of the movie features clips of Sloan wrestling with his own conscience over the course of several interviews-- the son of his closest friend has been killed, and despite his political commitment to stopping the violence, he wants to kill the killer-- not just out of revenge but out of a sense of loyalty to his family and those he loves. He ends with a roll call of those he knows or has come across during filming who have been cut down young, and the pictures show smiling, painfully young men at their prime.

No two-hour documentary can fully cover such a broad topic, and there are some important components missing. Latino gangs go mostly unmentioned. The effects of welfare reform and the draconian "criminal justice" reforms of the Clinton era are not explored. And the voices of women are largely absent. That said, Bastards of the Party is a remarkably thorough and illuminating documentary that sheds light on a part of Black history-- and American history-- that has been mostly ignored. Sloan is a gifted interviewer who allows his subjects' voices to narrate most of the film, and he conveys complex political ideas in a concise, accessible way. It's worth watching it on HBO or buying the DVD-- and take Sloan's advice and read Mike Davis's City of Quartz for even more depth on this topic.