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In fashion, there are so many gangs, if you identify too much with one, you get caught - I would lose my freedom.

Even gang members imagine a future that doesn't include gangs.

The Black Panther Party was not a gang. They grew out of a young black intelligentsia on college campuses.

When you are culture, you're forever young, like Snoop. When you're on that level, it's just contributing to the gangsta.

Everyone has a Latino inside them.

In Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool there are white gangs that share the same backgrounds - they come from broken homes, completely dysfunctional, mums for the most part unable to cope, the fathers of these kids completely not in the scene.

What a lot of people don't realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone.

Gang members have invariably grown up in broken, chaotic homes, often experiencing domestic violence; they have truanted from school and many have been formally excluded; and they live in neighbourhoods where worklessness, addiction and crime are rife.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

How did we suddenly become entranced with gangster culture? I saw it this morning on campus. When did the black community say we should all look like criminals?