Racialized punishment and the sensorial symbolism of death row for America's Black gangster class

This chapter argues that historical and complex patterns and practices of racism in the US have profoundly impacted the sensory development of the Black gangster class, particularly the sixth and seventh senses: vestibular and proprioception. Those two senses are often ignored in analyses of the more commonly known five senses: smell, sight, taste, hearing, and touch. Vestibular involves how a person senses her or his body in space, that is, in its surroundings, its environment. Proprioception, on the other hand, reflects how a person senses or maintains an awareness of the location of that person’s own body parts . Central to my argument is how spatial and temporal concerns—made significant by racialized containment and Black exclusion practices employed against Black America for hundreds of years—have in part led to a hyper-engagement among Black street gangsters of their vestibular and proprioception senses. And that hyper-engagement of the sixth and seventh senses has evolved for Black gang members into a support mechanism of life-or-death survival strategy—on the streets and in prison—as well as for Black-gangster attainment of legendary street status, whether alive or dead. Such theorization is based on my nearly 20-year ethnographic study of California’s two iconic Black street gangs: the Crips and Bloods.