Skinheads in the Antelope Valley :: essays papers

Skinheads in the Antelope ValleyWilliam Finnegans essay The Unwanted explains the history andmake-up of the Antelope Valley and therefore explores the lives of someteenage citizens in order to discover reasons that cardinal stir gangs havesuch a significant role in the companionship and on its race. Absentp arents and lack of education are just two situationors facing teens thatultimately led the Los Angeles Suburb into becoming a company whereSkinheads and Boneheads are a norm and accepted as a part of everydaylife. C. Wright Mills idea of the sociological perspective, lookingpast the facades, is usable when analyzing the micro individual, andmacro broad, causes of teens becoming skinheads. Each day Americaseems to travel more and more diverse. Some people learn to accept thefact that America is made up of many different ethnic groups, epochothers believe the only ethnic group should be their own. There arevarious reasons for discrimination and it is a very controve rsialissue. In Finnegans condition he describes two gangs with opposingviews concerning racism and how each group expresses their beliefs.The racialist and anti-racist beliefs dont always end at the individual.Death is an all too greenness end and when an opinion becomes lifethreatening a problem arises. fit in to Finnegan, one of the twomajor gangs that occupy the streets of Lancaster and the AntelopeValley is, a white-supremacist skinhead gang, the Nazi Low Riders(N.L.R.s) and the other is, their rival gang of anti-racistskinheads, the Sharps (1998, p.88). One major timber the two gangsshare is their lack of education. Most, if not all, of the teensFinnegan interviewed, dropped unwrap of school, even though later someused other means of getting a high school diploma or acquiring a higheducation. Also it appears both gangs tend to resolve their issueswith violence. Most people would suss out that some violence is ineveryone, but it seems that well educated people ofte n find other meansto conquer their problems or go about solving them. Through historyknowledge has proved to be an unavoidable part of life. As children inthe community began dropping out of schools in vast poesy these kidswere forced to, willingly or not, get in knowledge elsewhere (1998). Amacro cause for the growing numbers of students dropping out of schooland joining the gangs, could be that the ideas and values of thosegangs apace spread through the streets and classrooms. This Leadsthe teenagers to make decisions about wether or not they prevail with the