ABSTRACT
Decades of research from a wide range of disciplines has highlighted the relegation of African Americans from distressed inner-city communities to the peripheries of the conventional economy, particularly following the intensification of urban deindustrialization in the 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of deindustrialization, and particularly following the onset of the crack epidemic in the mid-1980s, black gangs in Chicago reoriented themselves around the illicit drug trade, employing thousands of youth who had been locked out of the conventional economy. Recent research with gang members on Chicago’s South Side, however, reveals that the decline of the crack epidemic and the transformation of illicit drug markets have created widespread occupational displacement from the drug trade. Young African American gang members today find themselves marginalized within both the conventional as well as underground economies.
