Free There Goes My Social Life by Stacey Dash Page A

and I can only hope that he felt the love I had for him during his last days.

    On the first day of school in my new home in California, several buses pulled up to the school. I watched as black kids poured out of them. Oh , shit , I thought. I did the math that quick. They ’ re coming from somewhere , and it ’ s not here . Because my neighborhood was predominantly white, the government bused black kids in from South Central Los Angeles. It also bused white kids from my neighborhood to South Central L.A. Of course it was a recipe for disaster. The kids that got bused had to get up at 5:00 in the morning. By the time they arrived at school all they wanted to do was fight and sleep. It was obvious they didn’t want to be there. The teachers didn’t want them there either. And so my new California school was not a respite from violence, but instead a place embroiled in racial conflict. The bused kids stuck together, and the Valley kids stuck together. Since I was black, the Valley kids assumed I was a bus kid. Since I lived in the Valley, the bus kids wanted nothing to do with me.
    â€œYou’re from here?” the bus kids laughed, pointing at my lighter skin. My hair didn’t conform to their standards, either . . . as they told me repeatedly. “You’re not even black,” they’d say. Though I had established myself in New York as “Crazy Stacey,” my reputation didn’t reach to California. They saw me as “high sidity” too, which meant—of course—that I would scrap every single day.
    I didn’t like to fight. In New York, violence permeated the school . . . and perhaps the entire culture of the South Bronx. Turns out, California, absolutely dominated by gangs, was no different. The Crips and the Bloods were the most notorious gangs, and membership in one or the other was mandatory . . . like a class needed for graduation. The reason was simple. One guy alone at school will certainly get jumped. If this guy has a friend, he’ll be less of a target. His friend will have his back. This is an age-old principle. Even the Bible talks about it in Ecclesiastes 4: “Two are better than one. . . . Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.”
    Of course the guys in Los Angeles weren’t thinking of the Bible when they created their groups. But they figured if two is better than one, four is better than two; ten is better than four; fifty is better than twenty. That’s how gangs proliferated, on and on until every single student had to decide.
    â€œCrips or Bloods?” I was asked by a friend named Catherine as she and her twin sister Emily walked with me through the hallways on the way to class. Catherine was in one gang but her sister Emily was in the other, a house divided because Emily’s boyfriend was already established in a gang. I didn’t know which to choose—there was no “how to select the gang that’s right for you” quiz in Cosmo that month—so I joined the same gang as Emily based on nothing but the fact that her boyfriend was really a nice guy.
    That’s what breaks my heart. Gangbangers, drug dealers, and hustlers are all made out to seem like horrible people, when they’re just trying to survive. They’re just doing what they think is the only thing to do, but they’re being lied to: white people don’t actually hate them, all white people aren’t rich, and you don’t have to behave like criminals on television to be cool. I know what it’s like to believe you have one option—a gang—and to go along with it. Once I joined, my social life was set. Crips or Bloods. Red or blue.
    Of course people don’t join gangs by filling out a form and sending in an enrollment fee. To join, people have to prove their loyalty through horrible initiations involving revenge shootings, jail time, and more. Thankfully, they didn’t make me go through with