New York Times: The Gangs of Los Angeles: Roots, Branches and Bloods

Vintage film of gang members’ digging graves and attending funerals introduces Cle Sloan’s incisive documentary, “Bastards of the Party,” about the origins of the murderous street gangs of Los Angeles.

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“I’m banging for Athens,” “I’m banging for the Jungle,” are typical self-descriptions of the men Mr. Sloan knows. They mean, to put it plainly, what neighborhood they’re killing for.

Mr. Sloan joined the Bloods when he was 12, but now considers involvement in gangs “self-genocide.” His film, which he produced with Antoine Fuqua, the director of “Training Day,” sustains the courage of this indictment. It has its premiere tonight on HBO.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., with his PBS series “African-American Lives,” chronicled the ancestry of several prominent black Americans. The programs suggested that black history had often been too general (slavery, segregation, civil rights) or too specific (the sacrifice or malevolence of a parent or a grandparent) to give individuals a rich sense of their world-historical context.

Rigorous genealogies, the kind that Europeans have conducted for everything from the average Jacques to systems of morals, are where narcissism and intellectual life satisfyingly meet.

Now Mr. Sloan provides one such genealogy for the institution of the gang, and it’s immensely interesting. We misunderstand the gangs when we assume that they have no history or purpose apart from brute violence, but we romanticize them when we imagine that they’re bands of brave vigilantes. Clear-eyed history — shot through with archival film — begins to set the record straight.