High Price

Wilson concluded that the young men involved, far from being irrational, “may be acting as shrewd calculators of the probable costs and benefits of alternative courses of actions.” 1
    This is how the calculation might be made. Before taking action to avenge a slight to honor, there are risks including the loss of reputation and status from being labeled a coward that must be considered. Conversely, possible benefits include impressing women and other men, resulting in an increased chance at both long-term survival and successful reproduction.
    Potential costs of acts of revenge themselves, of course, include death, injury, or prison. But Daly and Wilson found that only about 10 percent of those involved who survived were ultimately convicted of a more serious crime than manslaughter, because the courts recognized that they were acting in self-defense. This means that they tended to serve little prison time. As a result, we can’t conclude that such people are acting without considering the consequences: many of the risks were visible to them. And we can also observe that such crimes take place overwhelmingly among young men who have little to lose, with few resources and limited future prospects. This type of behavior had characterized male youth in my neighborhood long before crack cocaine was even invented.
    Now, though, my brothers-in-law and the rest of the Bionic DJs claimed today’s young men were different. It was all about crack. These kids had no code at all: “They’d just as soon smoke you as look at you. Shit done changed,” they were saying. According to the oldheads, the “new” cocaine business meant that young bloods no longer followed any rules about respect. From hearing all this, I began to believe that crack really had changed things. The hot sound of rap, now ubiquitous, with its conflicted, ambiguous relationship to drugs—often glorifying slingers and hustlers, sometimes claiming to simply report what was “real,” other times trying to scare brothers straight—also made it all feel new.
    One night during my leave, I was driving through the hood with my brother Gary. At a stop sign, we were bumped by the car behind us. Shit, I thought, this is it; we’re getting jacked. I’d heard about incidents like this where guys had simply been shot, point-blank, when they jumped out to look at the damage. What if these were some drug boys thinking that we were infringing on their turf? Or some jackers who thought that we were high rollers slipping (meaning, being less than vigilant given our status)? Or maybe Gary had done some shit I didn’t know about and we were about to be murdered? I couldn’t keep those images of kids who would smoke you for no reason out of my mind.
    Gary, who probably had a gun himself, flew out of the car first to try to preempt any trouble. He soon came back laughing: the car behind us had been driven by a young woman. She and her friends thought we were ballers—pro athletes or other folks who had done well, now back in the hood—probably because we were driving Pop’s brand-new Deuce-and-a-Quarter, a Buick Electra 225. They just wanted to flirt with us; nothing sinister. With my heart still pounding out of control, I checked them out. Gary got one of the girls’ digits. But I just wasn’t feeling it.
    I felt like my neighborhood was becoming increasingly threatening; I saw constant news coverage of the “crack epidemic” and how it was destroying everything it touched. From the news, it seemed as though the senseless killings were spreading and unstoppable. In 1986, Time and Newsweek had each run five crack-related cover stories; the national media screamed out more than a thousand stories on the “scourge” in that year alone. Ronald and Nancy Reagan took to national TV to promote “outspoken intolerance” against drugs, calling them a “cancer” and asking Americans to join their antidrug “crusade.”
    I couldn’t see it at the time, but what had really changed in my world was not the creation of an unprecedented wave of drug-induced violence and a codeless new group of predatory youth. It was how our problems were being described and explained. In the case of the media, politicians seeking reelection—of both parties—had spread the word that drugs were the cause of inner-city problems and that making war on them would fix things. News organizations picked up the simple narrative, not questioning its assumptions.
    In the case of my