The Bélangers

In the wake of countless films and TV series, the very word “gang” evokes an entertainment subgenre with standard features: theft, drugs, prostitution, internal rivalries, crooked cops, murder, and tons of male ego. Out to Defend Ourselves, which charts the evolution of Montreal’s first Haitian street gang, the Bélangers, contains all of these elements, but the end result is far from sensationalist — or fictitious. A collaboration between Maxime Aurélien, a former leader of the Bélangers, and Ted Rutland, an interdisciplinary scholar at Concordia University, the book instead aims to place 1980s gang culture in a social context that corrects for the double ­standards deployed against young Black people.

“Instead of being purveyors of violence, the gang was a response to the violence of others,” Out to Defend Ourselves argues. “Rather than ‘terrorizing the city,’ les...