Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets

7. Avoiding Retaliation

| 143 7 Avoiding Retaliation In the moment of righteous indignation experienced when one has been wronged, one faces a crucial moment of choice, to decide to accept and live with the wrong that has been done (to “lump it”) or to retaliate.1 It is worthwhile to appreciate this gap between cause and effect, at least to recognize the myriad possible outcomes, as the consideration of how to respond after perceiving a wrong is far from academic.2 While a focus on individuals who abstain from retaliation may be rare in the criminological literature, scholars of law and society have found that the modal response to disputes is to “lump it,” leaving a social situation with a dispute unresolved, even in inner-city areas, where, as Elijah Anderson has argued, “the culture of the street does not allow backing down.” As Sally Engle Merry notes, on the basis of her classic ethnography of conflict management in an inner-city area, “Ultimately, the only resolution of disputes occurs through avoidance, the ‘exit’ of one or both disputants from the neighborhood.”3 Even studies supporting the “code of the street” thesis note that “reliance on street justice may deter would-be perpetrators from attacking because of fear of retribution.”4 Furthermore, “Violent retribution, and residents’ fear of it, may serve as a form of social control—perhaps preventing some types of crime in the community.”5 As yet such conjectures are purely hypothetical, for few studies explore how young people in the inner city manage to “lump it” when faced with a perceived injury. Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat’s observation that “social scientists have rarely studied the capacity of people to tolerate substantial distress and injustice” remains as pertinent today as thirty years ago.6 Such a capacity is fundamentally based on one’s ability to manage one’s emotions in the midst of a dispute. Emotions and Disputes Aside from a few remarkable exceptions, criminologists have mostly overlooked the emotional dynamics of disputes.7 In the literature on emotion management , on the other hand, much of the richest data focuses on how workers 144 | Performing Gang Identity on the Streets intrapersonally manage disputes.8 Arlie Russell Hochschild developed the notion of emotion management to reveal how individuals attune themselves through “surface acting” and “deep acting” to the rules and ideologies of private and public life. Hochschild was especially concerned with the emotive dissonance and alienation wrought when emotional labor is compelled by an employer, and one must attune one’s feelings, like it or not, to the demands of theworkplace.9 Thischapter,ontheotherhand,focusesonhowemotivedissonance may also result from the everyday phenomenon of emotion work, when young people must restrict their desire to retaliate because of structural constraints .10 Such emotion work involves considerable skills to manage a dangerous situation.11 Young people struggle to attune their actions and emotions to thedemandsofsocialstructureby“lumpingit,”orinlocalterms“suckingitup,” evenastheyexpressthefantasticdesiretoindulgeinrighteousretaliation.12 What constitutes an omission for criminologists certainly does not apply to studies of dispute resolution, which view the management of parties’ emotional dynamics as central to mediation and negotiation.13 A number of studies have focused specifically on how various socially entrusted troubleshooters manage the emotions of clients involved in disputes. Austin Sarat and William L. F. Felstiner show how divorce lawyers must manage the emotions of their clients in order to help them focus on resolving the case and moving on.14 Others have shown how deputy U.S. marshals must manage the anger and grief of prisoners as they are taken into custody.15 Yet, as with studies in the sociology of emotions more generally, the focus is disproportionately on the workers, in terms of how they must manage either their own emotions or the emotions of those with whom they are charged.16 Few studies have gone as far in examining the emotional dynamics of crime as Jack Katz’s pioneering book Seductions of Crime. In his discussion of righteous slaughter, Katz invokes the sensation of “wetness” to exemplify the experience of humiliation, and such images as water boiling over, or of the cartoon character Yosemite Sam exploding in rage, to illustrate the felt dynamic by which “rage constructs and transforms humiliation so quickly and smoothly that talking and writing about the process can very easily become artificial and obfuscating.”17 Katz’s more recent work analyzes road rage using the metaphor of dominoes, exploring the interactional moves of conflicts as both parties struggle to make the final avenging move and not...