Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (review)

There is insight in Hoodlums, intelligence, and much scholarly erudition: 48 pages of notes, mostly citations, to go with 221 of text. But these virtues are hard to find, buried in repetitious verbiage, obscured by a tendentious thesis, diluted by a range of subjects too great to encompass in a short book.

The thesis advanced at the beginning is that real and imaginary villains in general serve useful functions, providing upright folks with vicarious experiences, the wider society with a "safety valve" (4). Without them life would be duller, and there would be a "decline in socially beneficial resultants," ( 5. ) Above all, throughout "... the epic morality play known as as American history," ( 21) black villainy has been essential to defining white virtue.

Perhaps fortunately, this banal idea is rarely heard from once advanced at the beginning. Certainly it is not tested: proof would require extensive comparison with how Danes, say, or Sri Lankans, define "virtue" but there is little room for this or indeed much that is included already. Four chapters: "Villainy in Black and White," "Slaves as Subversives," "Blacks and Social Banditry," and "Gangland: Crime and Culture in Contemporary America," move roughly forward in time, despite much doubling back. The subjects mentioned, although often in no more than short lists, heavy on the adjectives, include: the idea of evil in the great world religions, a history of racial prejudice from the Greeks, others of slavery, of crime, of the US prison system, of racist white authors and resistant black ones, of militants and Marxists, Martin and Malcolm, Hollywood and hiphop. There is almost always, we learn, a difference between "the black worldview"—evidently encompassing Muslims, Christians, intellectuals and crack addicts—and white opinion; "the general public" unexpectedly appears on p. 181.

A central problem, never overcome, is that Van DeBurg insists on defining many "villains" as "social bandits." That term, in the original formulation by Eric Hobsbawm, referred to a type best exemplified in the Anglo tradition by Robin Hood. A true social bandit, widely admired at least at some distance, operates outside the law but at the same time personifies both group resistance to oppression and a number of more personal virtues. Nat Turner, say, may fit here, certainly the Black Panthers. But DeBurg dances uncomfortably around both real life criminality and such fictional figures as those featured in the "blaxploitation" films of the '70s, and their even more noxious and more recent counterparts. If there is in fact an "outlaw agenda" ( 118), its content is never defined, but for black social bandits the bar is set low: "In the black worldview it is often sufficient that the bandit exhibit a kind of unadorned hypermasculinity normally denied the menfolk of a maligned race." (115). That is, specifically, pimps and drug dealers need not, and surely do not, "divide the spoils... become public benefactors" or indeed exemplify any kind of social or individual good so long as they remain ruthless and independent. (115)

The final chapter, and conclusion, confronts the fact that life in the ghetto has grown worse over the past two decades, partly because of an upsurge in drug use and black-on-black violence. Van DeBurg notes that the Kerner Commission, back in the '60s, after investigating the root causes of the black riots of the day, hoped to forestall more trouble to come by calling, vainly, for new white attitudes and a new will. His own prescription is not much different: we should all listen to each other. Will we? "Only time will tell whether an informed, empathetic understanding of black villains and social bandits will lead to a noticeable improvement in race relations" (p. 221). Indeed.