Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh
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Book Reviews of Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
Book Review: fastinating reading
Summary: 5 Stars
I heard about this book as a result of the author doing an interview on NPR. Since I live in a somewhat mixed neighborhood in-town in a mid-size city, I had some personal interest as to insights into gangs and lower-income life.
I found the book to be fastinating reading, and an easy read. The reader should understand that the gang the author tagged along with and the housing projects that he frequented were of a large scale in a large city, and may not be indicative of lower level gangs and street neighborhoods with less structure. Still, the leadership, management, and structure involved in running a large gang operation was something I had not anticipated. Likewise, the author describes, and was conflicted by, as was I, an unexpected and enlightening interplay of the various "good deeds" that the gang performed versus their illicit activities and power tactics. The idea that the gang filled a "services" void (protection, food and clothing contributions, youth activities, dispute mediation) for the residents of the community is something I heard of before but did not really think about.
The book left me thinking about what it really would take to bring this sector of our society out of poverty and into the mainstream. The author does not address this, or any solutions at all, and this is perhaps the books' only shortcoming.
Book Review: Solid Account of Life in the Chicago Projects
Summary: 4 Stars
Like many others, I found the chapter of Freakonomics based on Venkatesh's data on drug dealing to be the most compelling of the book. So I looked forward to picking up this extended account of his journey into the murky world of Chicago public housing and the research he did there from 1989-95. His entry into that world is a decidedly naive and somewhat accidental one, as he commences work toward his sociology PhD at the University of Chicago by assisting in a research project. This project requires him to go to several apartments in a public housing high-rise to administer a rather ridiculous questionnaire. Unfortunately, the resident drug gang suspects him of being a spy for a rival gang and holds him overnight until their boss can decide what to do with him.
Fortunately, the boss ends up taking a shine to Venkatesh and allows him to hang out around the gang and its slice of the Robert Taylor Homes housing project. This one decision (based at least partially on the gangster's belief that Venkatesh will use the material to write a biography of him), grants the student and budding scholar almost unprecedented access to the day-to-day functioning of a street gang, as well as a passport to the roam around the projects talking to the residents about their daily life. Venkatesh is very up front about his naivety, his discomfort with the role he was playing to gain the trust of people, the complexity of needing to befriend them in order to hear their stories, and the benefit his access to their stories has had on his academic career. In the end, he concludes that he is just as much a "hustler" as those he meets throughout his seven years, taking advantage of others as needed, in order to survive.
The focus of the book is on his interaction with the "Black Kings" gang, however, much of the material on their workings is interesting but not necessarily revelatory Basically, if you've seen season one of The Wire, you'll be more or less equally up to speed on the mechanics of drug slingin' street gangs. This is at least partially due to the rather edited view of operations the gang afforded him. What's more surprising in his account is the naked power over daily life in the projects wielded by the female middle-aged president of the tenants association, who comes across as just as venal and egocentric as the gang leader. Indeed, she and the gangster had an established rapport and arrangement, in which she could tap the gang for "donations" for community events, or to police the buildings, in exchange for not raising a fuss about their drug dealing. Venkatesh also spends a fair amount of time with the regular "citizens" of the projects, as well as a few community workers and one policeman. A striking absence from his fieldwork is any attempt to interact with the Chicago Housing Authority, under whose auspices the Robert Taylor Homes falls, and whose utter ineptitude and corruption pervades the entire book.
The cumulative effect is a rare look at the networks of power within a poor urban community, as well as a cautionary tale about the strengths and weaknesses of the ethnographic process. I found myself rather more drawn to his stories of the various licit and illicit hustles people run in order to make ends meet -- it turns out these are the focus of an earlier work of his called Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, which I'll probably end up reading at some point.
Note: As at least one other reviewer has noted, those interested in the "participatory observation" approach to studying gangs would be well-advised to check out Martin Sanchez-Jankowski's Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society, based on ten years of fieldwork among 37 gangs in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Rather oddly, Venkatesh never refers to it.
Book Review: Fun and informative; you can't put it down
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoyed this very much. Sudhir can write so well that it's one of those "you can't put it down" books. I also learned a great deal of interesting knowledge that I would not have been able to find out any other way: not only what the drug trade is like, but what life is like inside a dilapidated low-cost housing tower. I've been recommending this to all my friends.Book Review: Amazing book - But I have ambiguous feelings about the author
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a very readable book - sad, funny and haunting. However I have some very ambiguous and sometimes very negative feelings towards the author Sudhir Venkatesh, especially while reading his last chapter. For most of the book, the relationship between Sudhir and JT comes across as a warm and trusting freindship. I really was rooting for both of them: for Sudhir to be successful in his academic ventures and for JT - not to end up being killed or land in jail. But the last chapter was very off-putting. I was pained when Sudhir says JT wasn't his friend and he doubts whether he ever was. He also sounds very condescending when he describes JT as being clingy. It really appears that Sudhir was really using JT for his research and all the "friendship" and camaraderie was just playacting - a means to an end. In the end Sudhir made his academic career out of the people who befriended him and after his mission was accomplished, he has discarded them like a used glove.
I am an Indian-American and I am proud of the success and acclaim that Sudhir Venkatesh has recieved first for his part in "Freakanomics" and now for "Gang Leader For a Day". However as a fellow South Indian, I would like to remind him of another South Indain virtue: Do not kick down the ladder that you climbed on to fame and fortune.
Book Review: Embedded in the Projects
Summary: 4 Stars
"Rogue sociologist" and author Sudhir Venkatesh is aptly described in GLFAD's foreword as "born with two abnormalities: an overdeveloped curiosity and an underdeveloped sense of fear." Both are evident in this impressive narrative of his extensive, nearly decade long doctorate research in sociology, conducted while embedded in the Chicago projects. Venkatesh unwittingly set the bar high: his home away from home, which he more or less stumbled upon while naively (yet purposely) straying far away from his University of Chicago on an ethnographer's quest, was Robert Taylor Homes, one of the nation's largest and most violent ghettoes. Not to mention the late 80s and early 90s marked a period especially tarnished by an epidemic of ruthless and widespread gang activity, not the least of which was due to the pervasive sale and abuse of the too-affordable crack cocaine. This story is as much about the projects and their interplay with the drug trade as it is about Chicago's street gangs.
Venkatesh penetrated the inner circles and high ranks of the vicious, drug-dealing street gang the Black Kings by more or less going to places that he shouldn't have, and fraternizing with people he should have run from. Venkatesh seemed to avoid the gang's wrath through a combination of childlike naivet? and flattery; his access to main character and Black Kings leader J.T., for instance, was engendered by the latter's mistaking Venkatesh for his biographer. The gang also attempted to use "The Professor" to spread its propaganda, emphasizing how its money and security made the projects safer, and making sure Venkatesh took ample notes at events like community outreach programs, voter registration drives, and life-skills workshops. Fortunately for the GLFAD's readers, Venkatesh's curiosity extended to the gang's seedier side, and his descriptions of digging beneath the surface to witness beatings, shootings, and extortion make the story a page turner.
That's not to say that Venkatesh didn't possess common sense and his wits about him, at least as he got older and wiser. He had a knack for knowing when to stop asking questions, and when not to get involved in the brutal mayhem around him (being an admitted coward works wonders that way, although Venkatesh second guessed a lot of his decisions not to at least try to involve the police). He made a great many alliances with gang leaders, community activists, squatters, cops, prostitutes, and garden variety hustlers, while never pitting them against one another- a balancing act that got more delicate the longer he stayed, especially as events like FBI raids and the planned demolition of the projects increased paranoia among Robert Taylor's residents.
Venkatesh's relationship with J.T. is the best chronicled and most powerful of GLFAD. The gang leader is no clich?d thug with a heart of gold, and yet his positive contributions to his community are more evident than the often subtle influence of drugs. He was college educated, loved his extended family, was more honest than most about his role in the community, and worked hard at his illicit "profession." [GLFAD gets its title from J.T.'s handing over his responsibilities to Venkatesh for a day, after the latter questions how difficult his "work" really is.] J.T. craved legitimacy and waxed about how a drug economy was "useful for the community," by redistributing undesirable drug addicts' money into the hands of ordinary citizens through the gangs' philanthropic efforts. His relationship with Venkatesh was both intimate and instructional, and daresay, sweet at times (particularly at the story's end).
Sadly, the uplifting messages are few, and a big theme of the book is how conventional sociology tools are ill-fitting to Robert Taylor Homes' hardships, and how Venkatesh's colleagues were (understandably) out of touch with the inner-city. The outlook on the projects' side wasn't any rosier: take home messages from the projects included (i) everyone is a hustler when you're facing extreme impoverished circumstances, with few exceptions; and (ii) a thirst for power trumps- although can coexist with- helping your fellow man. The sense of community was never as powerful in Robert Taylor as when in lockstep with lining the pockets of those extending a helping hand. No birthday party was assembled without drug money funding, soda kickbacks from local markets, and hired hot dog grilling duty; well-connected (and self-appointed) housing authorities assisted tenants for "consulting fees"; neighborhood meetings couldn't assemble without specious security detail and room fees. Ventakesh himself realized his complicity when it was pointed out to him that his research was a hustle, too: he exercised kindness and showed compassion to those in the ghetto, but his research and data were the ends justifying much of his means.