Dr. Lam’s book offers a much needed and unrelenting critical account on youth gangs that fills a vast void in the literature. Previous gang research has focused on poverty, racism, identity, violence, and oppression, yet fails to recognize the role of education or schooling of Vietnamese American youth. For a proper historical and cultural context, and data scrutiny, Lam uses critical theories and a solid materialist critique to question empire, positionality, power, privilege and access.  

Using empirical, evidence-based, and informed positions to synthesize the past and contemporary politics of migration, space, and racialization, his analysis provides a thought-provoking and stirring viewpoint of humanization and decolonization for teaching and learning. Lam also defies the conventional margins and controls of academe and public education, and recognizes the vibrant voice of young people theoretically and practically from the world of gang life associations to the private lives of members involved in the gang subcultures. Lam names the contradictions of street-socialized youth and counters conformist assessments of the global and U.S. gang construct to deliver a structural analysis of the origin of U.S. social ills toward Vietnamese and Asian American youth.  

Because participation in gangs is selective, and most youths avoid gang life, the dichotomy of Vietnamese American youth gang narratives versus non-gang narratives places concentration on this marginalized group. Drawing deliberate care to the variances between the two in a manner that neither sensationalizes nor employs a deficit model approach, Lam then offers considerate recommendations and implications for critical educators, policymakers, and future research that elevates all, as opposed to finger pointing or blaming the victim, toward a “pedagogy of the dispossessed.”