How Criminality Becomes U.S. Popular Culture

From the first time little boys learn to  play cops and robbers with toy guns, criminal imagery is prominently displayed throughout US society.  Crime and its risks are respected by the downtrodden, due to the way criminality provides a lottery-like opportunity to acquire  life’s most desired symbols of success. Somewhere along the way, people never learned the whole story.

We need to look at both sides of the page, in order  to grasp the whole story. The book, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt, explained how, “It seemed paradoxical in the 1830s that a liberal British government that had just abolished slavery could turn around and fight a war to support drug dealers, or that the proponents of free trade would align their interests with smugglers.”  International politics are not defined by rational thought. There are countless examples of wars that destroy thousands of innocent people, just so the victors could prove the point that they would win. Powerful figures in every agency of law enforcement are aware of the fact that illegal drug trafficking is an accepted reality.

Crime stories hold a special place in people’s hearts. It doesn’t matter if the characters are true depictions or fictional, people still gravitate towards those dramas.  An example of this can be found in the book, New Essays on the African American Novel, edited by L. King and L.F. Selzer. Their book sheds light on Candice L. Jackson’s essay, The Literate Pimp: Robert Beck, Iceberg Slim, and Pimping the African American Novel, where Jackson explains how, “By juxtaposing the autobiographical-styled narrative with textual revisions of canonical African American literary texts, Beck uses fiction to serve as a treatise on urban criminality and life in the American ghettos.” Robert Beck’s writing  style  displayed depth, realism, and layers of realism  that defined his poignant fiction writing. Of all of the stories he’s written,  few instances come to mind where he fails to introspectively question the relevance of street life and crime.  Robert Beck’s books are cautionary tales, misinterpreted as being books that glorify street life. His readers are escorted through the criminal underworld and allowed to arrive at their own conclusions.

The dilemma with Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck is the fact that many mainstream “Black American” writers of his era dismissed the literary complexity that his writings demonstrated. His place in history was largely denied, and the reasons are clear. The so-called Negro literary community was elitist and excluded non-select members from its informal guild. Secondly, Beck’s books had an allure that does not fit within the context of “academically respected” literature.

Graphic pulp fiction is considered ‘low brow’ and best suited for nondescript areas on bookstore bookshelves. The book, Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim, by Justin Gifford states how, “A strong case can be made that more than any other cultural figure of the past fifty years, Beck transformed American popular culture and black literature. Pimp became a potent symbol of subversive style and one of the most influential works of antiestablishment literature of the twentieth century.” Beck’s work is exactly that: subversive literature that has had a major impact on popular culture.  Additionally, academic scholars are beginning to closely examine his work, and are inserting Beck into some very important literary discussions. On top of that, people glance over the fact that Beck’s book Pimp had sold millions of copies and made a major impact within a few years after its release  in 1967.

There are a handful of film executives credited with consistently producing high quality “Black American” movies around the early 1970s. By the mid-1970s, a surge of low-quality urban movie scripts, poor production, and bad acting became known as blaxploitation. Until recently, historians failed to insert Beck into the same literary discussions that Chester Himes and Gordon Parks were a part of. Justin Gifford further explains that, “At the height of the blaxploitation era of the 1970s-an era in part ushered in by white screenwriters who stole outright from ‘Pimp’-Beck enjoyed the public spotlight for a brief moment.” The trajectory of Beck’s literary career could have gone a different way, had he achieved the recognition that he had earned. On another level, criminal depictions are not supposed to be a part of mainstream society. Crime should not be embraced by the non-criminal world.  

The deeper we look, the more we see the convoluted nature of illegal drug-trafficking. Books like, The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War, by Michael Levine and Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, by Nick Schou explain the two-sided nature of illegal drug-trafficking.  There is a big misconception, which defines crime as either being illegal or legal.

The book, The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies, by Susan Jacoby, explains that, “There is considerable evidence that Americans have become increasingly reluctant to see reason as a virtue, to apply rigorous standards of truth and logic to what they read and hear on social media, or to consider the impact of willed indifference to expertise on everything from scientific research to decisions about war and peace.”  The reluctance to apply facts to scenarios, combined with the willingness to embrace fiction, is a current, dominant characteristic of U.S. society.  In other words, romanticizing criminality is delusional. Illegal drug-trafficking is seen as a renegade-like endeavor, when it is really something much different.