Uprising: Crips and Bloods Tell the Story of America's Youth in the Crossfire.

THE term "uprising" in the title of this book refers to the Los Angeles riots. Like so much else in this fascinating book, it is deluded and dishonest. Beating up passing motorists or looting and setting fire to a supermarket when the police have disappeared is hardly Tiananmen Square. (In L.A., people joke that the only "uprising" to take place was that of the police, who rose up and ran away until shamed into doing their jobs.)

And on some level the Black Muslim authors and their subjects -- gang members who have "embraced the peace" and are "rebuilding their community" -- are aware of this dishonesty. There are no accounts here of mobs pulling people out of their cars, or the burning of South Central's only (black-owned) bookstore, or attacks on Korean grocery stores. That presumably would have spoiled the righteous "we are resisting the white man's attempt to destroy us with drugs and guns" tone of the book. The authors, both Nation of Islam members, prefer to elicit "constructive" answers along Farrakhanite lines when they ask "Big Phil" and others why they joined gangs, what they see as the causes of gang violence (police agents, provocateurs, of course), and why they "embraced the peace."

The gangbangers' overt bigotry is worth noting: although the overwhelming majority of those killed by Crips and Bloods are black, several members boast of having gone downtown to beat up and rob whites. "Red" describes his apprenticeship in the "Hoovers" in the 1970s: "Our basic thing was going in the white neighborhoods doing things. I had a homeboy, he and I personally went to some white people who were still living in our neighborhood, and we kicked in their door, ran up in there, and took their guns, their money, and everything else, and eventually they moved out." As to the extent of his rehabilitation, "I know times when I hurt people real bad, shot people . . . and felt bad. Especially if it was another brother. It's a bad feeling. Anything I ever did to white people I never felt any remorse for."

One also comes to realize just how strangely cut-off these L.A. black neighborhoods are. Leon, who "played a little college ball," says, "I used to take some of the homiez to the college campus with me because they had never been around a bunch of white people or Oriental people like that before." This isolation is also clear in the way neighborhood residents talk about starting businesses. "Q-bone" says that when he went to Washington, D.C., and Atlanta he was amazed to see black-owned businesses. Now he is working to put hot-dog carts in L.A. "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to see blacks out here with hot-dog carts." "Leon" has similar ideas but found local youth laughed when he suggested buying an ice-cream van like the ones driven by Mexicans: "It's the same as when they laugh at the Mexicans on the corners out here with these oranges and these little fruit stands. . . . Those are the type hustles that we used to do, that now we think we are too cool for."

Their descriptions of gang life and gang history make interesting reading. Many gangs go back thirty years, and some have their origins in youth or community groups that were supposed to be an alternative to gang activity. Strangely, no one can really explain why a "truce" took hold after the L.A. riots. It clearly had something to do with gang leaders getting old, with the efforts of activists like the ex - football player Jim Brown, and with competition from Mexican gangs. But several of the gangsters say it was during their jail terms that they realized peace was possible -- because prisons tend to divide on racial lines. "All before I got to Folsom I was gang-banging, fighting Crips. Then as soon as I got to the Folsom . . . everybody was saying 'we don't gang bang here. Up here it's all about fighting white boys, and the Mexicans. So we need each other.' "

Perhaps the saddest thing in Uprising is the impression one gets of communities crying out for order and discipline. Clearly, part of the appeal of gang membership is its rigid structure of rules. And certainly the jailhouse conversions to Islam undergone by several of the subjects of this book amount to submission to an even tougher regime. It may be that for all the conspiratorial rubbish some of these men talk about "white supremacy" bringing drugs and guns into the ghetto, white society really is partly to blame for the chaos and violence -- to the extent that the libertinism of the Sixties had a devastating effect on poor black communities. All the older gangsters have vague memories of a time when the center still held. As "T. Rodger" says, "When I came up, the neighbors used to be on us too, like they were our parents. If you were doing something wrong, they would whip you and then tell your people what you were doing, and you'd get another whipping when you got home."

But the biggest surprise in Uprising is the extraordinary Introduction by the rapper and actor Ice-T. While recognizing that "there are extremely admirable qualities" to be found in gangs, the maker of the notorious Cop-Killer album here fearlessly delivers the kind of bottom-line truth that you might expect to see on the Op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. "The mind-set of black folks has to change. I had to do it. . . . The first thing is that you have to admit that you've been messing up. . . . One of the best comments I've ever heard was 'the best weapon against racism is excellence.' That says it all."

This is the only ray of light in Uprising. There's something terribly depressing about the disingenuous message provided by the authors and their carefully selected interviewees. They preach economic self-determination but insist that a fair deal from the system is impossible. "If I was to go out there and get a job . . . they're going to find some reason not to hire me." They talk about responsibility but blame everyone and everything from slavery to the police to their own women for the gang violence that cost their friends' lives. Those who have learned to read, read only pseudo-history and pseudo-science, all of it vicious nonsense. Worst of all, their call to unity is also a snarl of racial hatred interwoven with tough talk about "military action" against the "real enemy." None of it gives one much hope for the communities from which the gangs have emerged.