Ghettoside

The phrase “Everybody knows” stands in for the larger concept that within the community, the perpetrators of violent crime are known to the rest of the community. In other words, the community is itself an in-group, and violence persists through a complex setup of shadow laws and communal justice. The popular perception of detective work is that of the police trying to unravel a mystery in order to bring the perpetrators to justice; there are often people in underground groups who have the information sought, but in popular media, these people are understood to exist in the shadows. In contrast, in places like South Central, the perpetrators of violence are known by everyone in the community—the only people they are not known to are the police. Detective work, therefore, is often described as a frustrating game of the police trying to figure out what the community already knows; the phrase frequently crops up to stand in for that frustrating concept. 

The complexity of clothing choices is frequently referred to, though not explicated or interrogated—it serves more as a tie to circumstance than something the author wishes to unravel. The primary purpose of raising it, outside of it being tied resolutely into the situations described, is to explain the counterintuitive nature of certain clothing choices. For example, Bryant’s decision to wear a Houston Astros hat, a clothing choice that connotes gang affiliation, is difficult to understand from the outside, as to someone outside the community it may feel like an obvious bad choice that may make him a target. Counterintuitively, though, this choice may have actually made him feel safe, as described by one member of the jury in his trial, by allowing him to fit in (Bryant himself described it as a way of getting girls). Other clothing choices are described as absurd Rorschach tests: to those in the know, Da’Quawn Allen’s orange bandana was a ridiculous, childish attempt to look cool and play dress-up; to the media, it was evidence of his gang membership. Further, clothing can be tragic: Dion Miles, for example, an art student with no gang ties, died solely because he happened to be wearing red when he got off the bus at the wrong stop and ended up in Crip territory.