I don’t know Gunnas history, but I work in a school that feeds into the high school he went to in Fairburn, & you’re right. It isn’t upper class black folk like the neighborhoods surrounding Westlake High School, but Fairburn is lower-upper middle class.
its messed up kids from middle class homes with 3-4 bedrooms and who have parents in both homes want to be thugs and street...same thing is happening on the east side of Atlanta in the wealthy areas of Lithonia.
Migos have outsiders thinking Gwinnett is a southern version of The Wire when in actually that’s where a lot of bruhs from lower income areas wanted to move and raise a family
I'm from the Eastside, and grew up later on in a single parent home with no car. If I had both parents present I woulda ended up at GA Tech lol. These cats be wanting to goon and be having hard working parents. Lotta times on the Eastside at least folks had young parents who used to be about that life but overcame their struggles, and the kids try to live through the rep their parents had like Nu Nu in ATL.
As a bruh that grew up in Gwinnett. It’s scary man. What happened is the kids from the more wilder parts of the city relocated to Gwinnett for whatever reason and the other kids adopted that mentality. Looking back it now, it’s clear. There were/are so many “gangs” and shootings, it was so hard to understand because we ALL live in decent houses. Lol I’m sure y’all touched on this but the Gwinnett reference stuck out to me.
When I got to Virginia, I was living in the suburbs with two parents (first in Woodbridge, then in Prince George). It was new for my brother and I, in California and our year in Memphis, we never had that kind of stability. Won't make this too long of a story, but my "parents" are both actually my stepparents (my brother's dad and his wife) and I respect them as such, to this day. But nobody besides my closest homeboys knew that...
The nikka that influenced me into selling drugs when I was 15, was in those suburbs but in a single parent home and also initially from a rougher area (Petersburg), so there are other kids in the suburbs who had a semblance of a background like ours. I won't say most kids because that ain't true, and for sure there are cats who legit never grew up anywhere else but the burbs, in a stable family, who try to come off tough. Bit there are more than a few exceptions...
Where I grew up in VA, I remember in high school if we went to other schools for events or games, we were considered suburban kids by other schools, big ass fight at a football game between my high school (Prince George) and Hopewell, which was considered a more "real" school back then...
You'll always have some suburban people (chicks too) doing too much to look a certain way, but in everybody suburb theres a percentage of people who background was a little different, you only know them from living in the burbs but you don't know their history!
I enjoyed Gwinnett when I was there in '13-14 (Buford, Flowery Branch area). Used to hoop at Bogan Park with a bunch of Mexicans and suburban has beens lol. Don't care all that much for Atlanta in general but I didn't have a bad time there...
