Signs of the times

What Paul Pierce's hand gesture - and his $25,000 fine - say about the fast-evolving world of gang signs

THE SEQUENCE, NEAR the end of the Boston Celtics' Game 3 playoff loss last Saturday, has been endlessly replayed over the past week: Celtics captain Paul Pierce, after being taunted by Atlanta Hawks rookie Al Horford, walks grimly toward the Hawks' bench during a timeout. As he does so, he raises his right hand and makes what looks like a tipped-over OK sign - palm down, forefinger and thumb joined in a ring, the rest of the fingers extending away from him - before teammate Brian Scalabrine corrals him and leads him away.

By Monday the NBA had decided Pierce's hand sign was a "menacing gesture," and fined him $25,000 for it. The league has not gotten into specifics, but the problem, most agree, was that what Pierce did looked like a gang sign.

Sports blogs and talk shows exploded with speculation on whether the sign was a "b" for Blood (or perhaps Boston), a "bk" for Blood Killer, or just a team signal meaning "blood, sweat, and tears." Pierce, in his one public statement on the matter, denied that he was making a gang reference but didn't specify what he actually had been trying to signal. Celtics executive director of basketball operations Danny Ainge said it was a "blood, sweat, and tears" sign that Pierce made often - but then became fuzzier when asked directly about the other meaning, saying he wasn't sure there was a gang connection.

That haziness might sound like a cover-up, but it's no surprise that it would be hard to tell whether Pierce was flashing a gang sign or just something that looked like one. Gang signing, it turns out, is not a uniform vocabulary so much as a set of simple and evolving dialects - and what exactly a given sign means, even to insiders, depends on who's flashing it, who's receiving it, and where the exchange is taking place.

The language of gang hand-signs is, as of yet, almost entirely unstudied by sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists, even those who focus on street gangs themselves. It fits into a larger, elaborate system of signs - habits of dress and gesture, slang and invented grammar, what one eats, drinks, even how one laces up one's shoes - that mark the allegiance of members of national and regional gangs like the Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings, the Vice Lords, and MS-13, as well as many smaller city- and neighborhood-based gangs.

Those signs are always in flux, and never more so than now. From their modern origins in postwar Los Angeles, gang signs have evolved and diverged and been recombined and reinvented, as particular gangs spread or their rituals are copied and reworked by other gangs.

"You see adaptations in the gangs, you see some of them getting more discreet," says Sean Varano, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied gangs in Detroit and New Bedford.

As a result, even if a sign flashed on national television may be an unmistakable threat to the person it's directed at, it could have myriad meanings to actual gang members. Spurred by intergang competition, circumscribed by police antigang efforts, and diluted by the increasing mainstreaming of inner-city gangster culture, these signs keep evolving - adapting to stay both specific and intentionally obscure, and persisting as one of the most powerful phenomena in street culture.

The origin of gang hand-signs, like much else about them, is murky. The precursors of today's gangs, according to Alex Alonso, a Los Angeles-based gang researcher, were born as blacks moved to cities like Los Angeles from the rural South after World War II. They were a sort of private militia, formed as protection against whites who tried, through often brutal campaigns of intimidation, to keep black families out of their neighborhoods. Only later did the gangs become largely criminal enterprises.

The earliest documented gang hand-sign, says Alonso, was a simple "v." Spotted in photographs dating to the late 1940s, it stood for "the Village," or Slauson Village, a neighborhood in south Los Angeles. Soon thereafter, a competing sign, a "w" for Watts, emerged - rioters in the 1965 Watts riots were seen flashing it.

Today, things have gotten far more complex. The iconography of hand signs includes not only b's (for Bloods) and c's (for Crips), but other letters, numbers, and symbols like five- and six-pointed stars, diamonds, pitchforks, and crowns (common among Midwestern gangs like the Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings). Signs can be thrown alone, or in tandem with a fellow gang member, or "stacked" in long, rapid sequences.

Most individual signs simply spell out the outlines of one's place in the gang universe, from nation to region to city to the particular "set," or subsidiary gang, that the signer belongs to. Often, though, stacking sequences will also spell out the name of a rival gang, along with the requisite derogatory embellishments. When gang members actually flash their signs, either for fellow gang members, rivals, or in videos posted to YouTube and MySpace, the performances can be complex and impressive to watch, a gymnastic sequence of often mimetic gestures: letters, symbols and pantomimed assassinations, and rival gang signs flipped upside down or distorted by the incorporation of a raised middle finger.

Hand signs find their way into other signs of gang affiliation as well, says Susan Phillips, an anthropologist at Pitzer College in California. Graffiti often has hand-sign imagery in it, as do gang tattoos. Gang members (and their many unaffiliated admirers) performing symbolic dances like the Crip Walk, in which they spell out words and names with their feet, often accompany themselves by stacking.

The regional variation can be dizzying. Signs migrate and are repurposed: A Crips "c," Gangster Disciple five-point star, and Latin Kings crown might be combined by new gangs or new offshoots of old gangs into a sort of sign creole. The sign-stacking videos on MySpace and YouTube haven't created a nationally uniform vocabulary but instead allowed signers to better appropriate signs that they might otherwise never have seen. Not wanting to be seen as simply copying other gangs, signers go to elaborate lengths to remake what they take.

"Stuff from California gets to us down here in Houston," says Victor Gonzalez, the director of program services for the Houston mayor's antigang office, "but it gets all mixed in. You'll have a combination of different Midwest signs and signals with colors from the West Coast."

The almost obsessive attention to signs that certain gangs display is a measure of the sense of identity members derive from them. Crips and Bloods famously differentiate themselves through the color of their clothing, Crips in blue, Bloods in red. But the use of symbols goes further than that: Some Crips avoid using the letter "b" in speech, and some Bloods do the same with the hated "c." Things that for non-gang members are mundane nondecisions - what color ink to write in, how to lace one's shoes - become signs of affiliation. So might a bandanna folded in a particular way and worn in one's back pocket, a hat brim turned to the left or the right, a hair part or a particular pocket pulled inside out.

Designer names are used, as well: According to Gonzalez, some gangs are partial to Calvin Klein, the initials being repurposed as "Crip killer." One Detroit gang that Varano looked at, the Cash Flow Posse, dressed all in University of North Carolina gear for reasons he was never able to determine.

In one form or another, many of these signs are then adapted into popular culture as a signal of urban authenticity - a kind of streetwise fashion statement.

For the sports leagues and music labels where these signals show up, this creates often delicate situations in which they have to try to maintain their sense of edgy cool without seeming to endorse crime. The NBA in 2005 instituted a dress code for players in part to prevent them from wearing clothes that might be construed as gang-affiliated - Paul Pierce was a vocal critic of the policy, saying it stigmatized all urban fashion as gang clothing. The NBA, the NFL, and college sports programs big enough to get their games broadcast on television all strictly police the flashing of gang signs during games. MTV blurs out the signs when they show up, as they often do, in hip-hop videos.

Experts say it's no surprise that sports teams would be sensitive, and not just because they worry about the example athletes set for young fans. Sports teams, as much as any other organization, are aware of the power of these signs - they have uniforms, ceremonies, cheers, flags, and team colors all designed to display and cement fierce loyalty. When athletes show solidarity with a gang, they aren't just associating themselves publicly with violent criminality - they are also dividing their loyalties. A basketball player who makes a gang sign, even an ambiguous one, is suggesting that he's driven by something more powerful than just the will to win for a basketball team.

C. Ronald Huff, a gang expert and sociologist and the dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, helped develop the gang-sign policy at Ohio State when he was on the faculty there. The school, he recalls, dealt harshly with football and basketball players flashing gang signs during games. "The message was, 'You can't do anything to represent that you are a member of a gang, because you are now part of another team, another organization,' " he says.

So far, say gang experts, this mainstreaming of gang signs has had only a limited effect on the signs themselves, but that may change. As gang fashion has worked its way into the mainstream, the particular meanings encoded in the clothes has been somewhat diluted.

And while "stacking" has perhaps not reached the level of mainstream penetration of former gang signals like crooked baseball caps, rolled-up pant legs, and neatly knotted bandannas, it may be on its way. Last year a Web video called "White Chicks and Gang Signs," by a Canadian songwriter and comedian named Billy Reid, made the rounds of various video sites. The video was basically a collection of images culled from what has become a rather ubiquitous Web phenomenon, snapshots on social networking sites of college-age white girls - in school hallways, at the beach, in ball gowns, even two girls in the Piazza Navona - all flashing gang signs.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.