Youneverknow.

[Wilson Gray]

Spike TV's Gangland is featuring the Salt Lake City Crips, primarily,
with very brief of the Bloods and the Pachucos. A Crip notes two
differences between the O[riginal]G[angster]'s in L.A. and the SLC
version:

Gang-membership is unrelated to race - "You don't have to be black to
be down!" - abstracting away from speech-patterns, of course, though
the majority of the local OG's are Tongans and other
South-Sea-Islanders whose immigrant parents moved them to SLC in order
to get them away from the thug life in South-Central. For purposes of
racism, random SS-Islanders are non-distinct from similarly-hued and
-haired people of sub-Saharan African descent. But their major
difference from the real soul-brother is that SS-Islanders, for
historical reasons, are Mormons, causing parents immediately to think
of the Vatican City of Mormonism as the place to go to save the
children. And there's no real territoriality. It's not possible to be
secure anywhere in the 'hood outside of the company of your homeboys
or that of your family (family is sacrosanct to Mormons, whatever the
circumstances). A person can be found to be "slippin' " a couple of
houses down from his own crib; not only do the Crips as a whole fight
with the local Bloods and Pachucos, but their own Crip subunits fight
one another for the title of baddest subunit..

(In my youth, "slipping" was non-distinct from "creeping":
clandestinely associating with a significant other not one's own, i.e,
merely a variant of standard "slipping around.")

In SLC slang, living the the thug life is known as "crippin' "; the
initiation ritual, the usual beatdown, is called a "court-in."

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org