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Gang Leader For A Day – by Sudhir Venkatesh
A Rogue Sociologist Crosses the Line.
First published 2008.
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make a sociological
observation
‘Is this an offer?’
‘Nigger, this is the offer of a lifetime. Guaranteed that if you do this, you’ll have a story for all
college friends.’
He suggested that I try for a day. This made me laugh how could I possibly learn anything
worthwhile in a single day?
‘One day’ he said ‘Take it or leave it. That’s all I’m saying. One day.’
Sudhir Venkatesh spent a decade living with the Black Kings gang in South Side Chicago.
These extracts contain, as they say on TV, strong language and violence from the start.
In the preface he says that the book is about ‘an outsider looking at life from the inside.’
Selected Extracts
Chapter one – How does it feel to be black and poor?
As part of my heavy course load at the University of California I began attending seminars
where professors parsed the classic sociological questions: How do an individual’s
preferences develop? Can we predict human behaviour? What are the long-term
consequences, for instance, of education on future generations?
The standard mode of answering these questions was to conduct widespread surveys and
then use complex mathematical methods to analyse the survey data. This would produce
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statistical snapshots meant to predict why a given person might, say fail to land a job, or end
up in prison, or have a child out of wedlock. It was thought that the key to formulating good
policy was to first formulate a good scientific study.
I liked the questions these researchers were asking, but compared with the vibrant life I saw
on the streets of Chicago, the discussion in these seminars seemed cold and distant, abstract
and lifeless. I found it particularly curious that most of these researchers didn’t seem interested
in meeting the people they wrote about. It wasn’t necessarily out of any animosity – nearly all
of them were well intentioned – but because the act of actually talking to research subjects
was seen as messy, unscientific, and a potential source of bias.
Mine was not a new problem. Indeed, the field of sociology has long been divided into two
camps: those who use quantitative and statistical techniques and those who study life by direct
observation, often living among a group of people.
The quantitative sociologists often criticised the ethnographic approach. They argued that it
isn’t nearly scientific enough and that the answers may be relevant only to the particular group
under observation. In other words, to reach any important and generalisable conclusions, you
need to rely on statistical analyses of large data sets like the US census or other massive
surveys.
My frustration with the more scientific branch of sociology hadn’t really been coalesced yet.
But I knew I wanted to do something other than sit in a classroom all day and talk
mathematics.
I had had little exposure to African-American culture at all, and no experience whatsoever in
an urban ghetto. I had moved to Chicago just a year earlier from California, where I had
attended a predominately white college situated on the beach, UC San Diego. What little
knowledge I had of modern gangs came from movies and newspapers – and of course, the
constant caution issued by the U of C about steering clear of certain neighbourhoods.
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At first Venkastesh attempts to interview – but I wasn’t getting anywhere. Most of the
conversations ended up meandering along, a string of interruptions and half finished thoughts.
So I set about looking for young black men.
The Lake Park Projects looked good, at least on paper, and I randomly chose Building Number
4040.
‘Nigger, what the fuck are you doing here?’ one of them shouted, I tried to make out their
faces, but in the fading light I could hardly see a thing.
I tried to explain again, ‘I am a student at the university, doing a research survey, and I am
looking for some families.’ – they start laughing at him and someone pulls something from his
waistband – At first I couldn’t see what it was, but then I caught it caught a glint of light and I
could see it was a gun. He moved it around pointing it at my head once in a while, and
muttering something over and over – ‘I’ll take him,’ he seemed to be saying.
A few of them seemed to think I was an advance scout from a Mexican gang, conducting
reconnaissance for a drive-by attack. At the front a large man powerfully built but with a boyish
face. His name was J.T., and while I couldn’t have known it at this moment, he was about to
become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come.
I explained the project as best I could. It was being overseen by a national poverty expert, I
said with the goal of understanding the lives of young black men in order to design better
public policy. My role, I said was very basic: conducting surveys to generate data for a study.
I read him the same question that I had read the others. He didn’t laugh, but he smiled - - How
did it feel to be black and poor?
‘I’m not black,’ he answered, looking around at the others knowingly.
Well then how does it feel to be, African American and poor?’
I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him.
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‘I am not African American either, I’m a nigger.’
‘Niggers are the ones who live in this building’ he said at last, ‘African Americans live in the
suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.’
He looked at few more pages of the questionnaire. ‘You ain’t going to learn shit with this thing.’
‘How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?’
He then spends the next few hours sitting talking to gang members in the stairwell – Once in a
while, I tried to interject a research question – What kinds of jobs did the people who lived here
have? Why weren’t the police in the building? – but they seemed less interested in answering
me than in talking among themselves about sex, power and money.
J.T. started tossing questions at me. What other black neighbourhoods, he asked, was I going
to with my questionnaire? Why do researchers use multiple-choice surveys like the one I was
using? Why don’t they just talk with people? How much money can you make as a professor?
Then he asked what I hoped to gain by studying young black people, I ticked off a few of the
pressing questions that sociologists were asking about urban poverty.
‘I had a few sociology classes,’ he said. ‘In college. Hated that shit.’
J.T. talked to me about the proper way to study people. ‘You shouldn’t go around asking them
silly-ass questions.’ He said. ‘With people like us you should hang out, get to know what they
do, how they do it. No one is going to answer questions like that. You need to understand how
young people live on the streets.’
The surveys in my bag felt heavy and useless. I realised that if I wanted to understand the
complicated lives of black youth in inner city Chicago, I had only one good opportunity to
accept J.T.’s counsel and hang out with people.
I felt a strange kind of intimacy with J.T. unlike the bond I’d felt with good friends. I sensed I
was getting a unique perspective on life in a poor neighbourhood. There were plenty of
sociological studies on economically disenfranchised youth, but most relied on dry statistics of
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unemployment, crime and family hardships.
They weren’t very receptive to interview questions, they probably had plenty of that from cops,
social workers and the occasional journalist.
Chapter two – First Days on Federal Street.
It would take me a few years to learn about J.T.’s life in detail.
I rarely took notes in front of J.T., because I didn’t want to make him cautious about what he
said. Instead I waited until I got back to my apartment to write down as much as could recall.
I hadn’t admitted to myself that the man I sat next to was, at bottom a criminal, I was too
caught up in the thrill of observing the thug life first hand.
There was something else too that helped me ignore the morality of the situation. The
University of Chicago scholars who had helped invent the field of sociology, back when it was
first became a legitimate academic discipline, did so by venturing into the murkier corners of
the city. They became famous through their up close study of the hobo [tramps], the hustler,
the socialite; they gained access to brothels and speakeasies [illegal drinking dens] and the
smoky back rooms where politicians plied their art. Lately I’d been reading the works of these
scholars. So even though I was hanging out with drug traffickers and thieves, at heart I felt like
a good sociologist.
J.T. was Venkatesh’s gatekeeper: I hadn’t thought about the drawbacks of having my
research so dependent on the whims of one person.
Professor Wilson was Venkatesh’s supervisor: I wanted to bring J.T. to Bill Wilson’s attention,
but I didn’t know how. I was already working on some of Wilson’s projects, but these were
large, survey-based studies that queried several thousand people at a time. Wilson’s research
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team included several thousand people at a time. Wilson’s research team included
sociologists, economists, psychologists and a dozen graduate students glued to their
computers, trying to find hidden patterns in the survey data that might reveal the causes of
poverty. I didn’t know anyone who was walking around talking to people, let alone gang
members in the ghetto. I felt I was doing something unconventional bordering on rouge
behaviour.
So while I devoted time to hanging out with J.T. I told Wilson and others only the barest details
of my fieldwork. I figured that I’d eventually come up with a concrete research topic that
involved J.T. at which point I could share with Wilson a well-worked out set of ideas.
Ms Mae spoke to me as though she were teaching a child about life, not giving an academic
researcher answers to scientific questions. Indeed, the time I was spending with families felt
less and less like research. People who knew nothing about me nevertheless took me inside
their world, talked to me with such openness and offered me the food that they had probably
budgeted for their own children.
No one back at the U of C had prepared me to feel such strong emotional connections to the
people I studied.
Talking to J.T.: ‘I’ve got to write some of this down.’- My heart froze after I realised what I’d just
said. I had never actually told J.T. that I was keeping notes on our conversations, I always
waited until we split up before writing down what had transpired. Suddenly I feared he would
think everything we’d witnessed and discussed, including all the illegal activities, and shut me
down. But he didn’t even blink.
In my brief exposure to J.T. and others in the building, I had already grown dismayed by the
gap between their thoughtfulness and the denigrating portrayals of the poor I’d read in
sociological studies. They were generally portrayed as hapless dopes with little awareness or
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foresight. The hospitality that Ms Mae showed and the tennants’ willingness to teach me not
only surprised me but left me feeling extraordinarily grateful. I began to think I would never be
able to repay their generosity. I took some solace in the hope that if I produced good, objective
academic research, it could lead to social policy improvements which might then better their
living conditions.
In most of the sociological literature I’d read about gangs… [they were] portrayed as a
nuisance at best, and more typically a major menace.
J.T.’s gang seemed different. It acted as the de facto [real] administration of Robert Taylor [the
building]: J.T. may have been a lawbreaker, but he was a lawmaker as well. The Black Kings
policed the building more aggressively than the Chicago police did. Roughly once a month,
they held a weekend basketball tournament. This meant that the playgrounds and surrounding
areas got thoroughly spruced up..
I had been hanging around J.T. and his gang for several months now, and I’d never seen J.T.
engage in violence. In the weeks afterwards, I began to contemplate the possibility that I would
see more beatings, perhaps even fatal incidents. I still felt exhilared by my access to J.T.’s
gang, but I was also starting to feel shame. My conviction that I was merely a sociological
observer, detached and objective, was starting to feel false. Was I really supposed to just
stand by while someone was getting beat up? I was ashamed of my desire to get close to the
violence, so close to a culture that I knew other scholars had not managed to see.
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Chapter three – Someone to Watch Over Me.
What was I, an impartial observer – at least that’s how I thought of myself – supposed to do
upon seeing something like this? [a punishment beating of an old man in poor health] I actually
considered calling the police that day. But I didn’t do anything. I am ashamed to say that I
didn’t even confront J.T. about it until some six months later, and even then I did so tentatively.
I leaned on J.T.’s car, quivering from shock. He took hold of me firmly and tried to clam me
down. ‘It’s just the way it is around here,’ he whispered, a discernable tone of sympathy in his
voice. ‘Sometimes you have to beat a nigger to teach him a lesson. Don’t worry, you’ll get
used to it after a while.’
I thought no, No, I don’t want to get used to it. If I did, what kind of person would that make
me? I wanted to ask J.T. to stop the beating…
I’d been spending so much time with the Black Kings, a lot of the tenants wouldn’t speak to me
except for a quick hello or a bland comment about the weather. They plainly saw me as
affiliated with the B.K.’s and just as plainly they didn’t want to get involved with me.
Autry sometimes sat for hours, leaning back in a chair with his skinny arms popped behind his
head, telling me the lessons he’d learned from his days as a pimp.
J.T. talking to Venkastesh: ‘I didn’t bring you here. I can’t protect you. Not all the time anyway.
You did this on your own.’ J.T. smiled, pressed his finger into my chest one last time, with
force, and walked away.
Chapter four – Gang Leader for a Day.
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A few of my professors were seasoned ethnographers, experts in the methodology of firsthand
observation. They were insistent that I avoid getting so close to any one source that I would be
beholden to him. Easier said than done. I hadn’t forgotten how agitated J.T. became when he
saw me breaching out into the community. By now J.T. wasn’t my only access to the
community, but he was certainly my best access. He was the one who had brought me in, and
he was the one who could open – or shut – any door. But beyond all that lay one simple fact:
J.T. was a charismatic man who led a fascinating life that I wanted to keep learning about.
J.T. spoke of his job with dispassion as if he were the CEO of some widget manufacturer – an
attitude that I found not only jarring but, given the violence and destruction his enterprise
caused, irresponsible.
He fancied himself as a philanthropist as a much as a leader. He spoke proudly of quitting his
mainstream job in downtown Chicago to return to the projects and use his drugs profits to ‘help
others’. How did he help? He mandated that all his gang members get a high school diploma
and stay off drugs. He gave money to some local youth centres for sports equipment and
computers. He willingly loaned out his gang members to Robert Taylor tenant leaders, who
deployed them on such tasks as escorting the elderly on errands or beating up a domestic
abuser, J.T. could even put a positive spin on the fact that he made money by selling drugs. A
drug economy he told me, was ‘useful for the community’, since it redistributed the drug
addicts’ money back into the community via the gangs philanthropy [charity].
I was nervous not because I was implicating myself in an illegal enterprise. I hadn’t even really
thought about that angle. I probably should have. At most universities, faculty members solicit
[get] approval for their research from institutional review boards, which act as the main
insurance against exploitative or unethical research. But at the time, with little understanding of
these protocols, I simply relied on my own moral compass.
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This compass wasn’t necessarily reliable. To be honest, I was a bit overwhelmed by the thrill
of further entering J.T.’s world. I hoped he would someday introduce me to the powerful Black
Kings leadership.
The thought of hitting someone in the face – delivering a ‘mouthshot’ - made me nauseous.
‘Sudhir’ J.T. said ‘you have to realise that if you do that [not give out a punishment beating],
then you lose respect. They need to see you are the boss, which means you have to hand out
the beating.’
‘Nigger they need to fear you.’
Chapter five – Ms Bailey’s Neighbourhood
At the University of Chicago, Jean Comaroff, an accomplished ethnographer, said I was
spending too much time with men. Since two-thirds of the community were women raising
children, she suggested that I try to better understand how women managed households,
secured services from the CHA, and otherwise helped families get by.
‘You want to understand how black folks live in the projects. Why we are poor. Why we have
so much crime. Why we can’t feed our families. Why our kids can’t get work when they grow
up. So will you be studying white people?
‘Yes’ I said. I understood, finally, that she also wanted me to focus on the people outside
Robert Taylor who determined how the tenants live day to day.
‘But don’t make us the victim.’ She said. ‘We’ll take responsibility for what we can control. It’s
just that not everything is in our hands.’
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Increasingly I found that I was angry at the entire field of social science – which meant to some
degree, that I was angry at myself. I resented the fact that the standard tools of sociologists
seemed powerless to prevent the hardships I was seeing. The abstract social policies that my
colleagues were developing to house, educate, and employ the poor seemed woefully out of
touch. On the other hand, life in the projects was starting to seem too wild, too hard, and too
chaotic for the staid prescriptions that social science could master. It struck me as only partly
helpful to convince youth to stay in school; what the value in giving kids low paying menial jobs
when they could probably be making more money on the streets?
I felt as though the other scholars were living in a bubble.
Was it possible, I wondered to be in the projects for any length of time and remain neutral, an
outsider, an objective observer?
Chapter six – The Hustler and the Hustled.
Four years deep into my research, it came to my attention that I might get into a lot of trouble.
I did see a lawyer, and I learned a few important things.
First, if I became aware of a plan to physically harm somebody, I was obliged to tell the police.
Second, there was no such thing as ‘researcher-client confidentiality’, akin to the priviledge
conferred upon lawyers, doctors, or priests. If I withheld information I could be cited for
contempt.
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I had become so involved in the daily dramas of tagging along with Ms Bailey and J.T. that I’d
nearly abandoned my study of the broader economy my professors wanted to be the
backbone of my research.
‘Let me try again. Either you’re with us – you feel like you’re in this with us and you respect
that – or you’re just here to look around. So far these niggers can tell that you’ve been with us.
You come back every day. Just don’t change, and nothing will go wrong, at least not around
here.’
Without Ms Bailey’s say-so, no one was going to speak with me about any illegal activities.
I spent the next three months focused on meeting the matriarchs of the high rises. There were
plenty to choose from: more than 90% of the households in Robert Taylor were headed by a
female.
While official statistics said that 96% of Robert Taylor’s adult population was unemployed,
many tenants did have part-time legitimate jobs – as restaurant workers, cabdrivers, cleaning
ladies in downtown corporate offices and nannies to middle class families
I was different from all the journalists and other outsiders who came by hunting up stories.
They didn’t eat dinners with families or hang around at night to share a beer; they typically
asked a lot of questions and then left with their story, never to return. I prided myself on this
difference.
It was embarrassing to think that I had been so wrapped up in my desire to obtain good data
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that I couldn’t anticipate the consequences of my actions. After several years of in the
projects, I had become attuned to each and every opportunity to get information from tenants.
This obsession was primarily fuelled by a desire to make my dissertation stand out and
increase my stature in the eyes of my advisors.
Chapter seven – Black and Blue
..are you telling me I need to worry if I write about cops? Two weeks later my car was broken
into, the lock had been expertly picked. I began to fear the police much more than I had ever
feared J.T. and the gangs, it was the cops that had the real power.
Looking back, I think it would have been better to learn more about neighbourhood from the
cops’ perspective. But this wouldn’t have been easy. Most of the tenants probably would have
stopped speaking with me if they thought I was even remotely tied to the police. One reason
journalists often publish thin stories about the projects is that they typically rely on the police
for information, and this reliance makes the tenants turn their backs.
It wasn’t until months after my car was broken into that Reggie confirmed it had been the
police who did it.
I had actively misled J.T. into thinking that I was writing his biography, mostly by never denying
it. This might have been cute in the early days of our time together, but now it was purely
selfish not to tell him what my study was really about.
Chapter eight – The Stay-Together Gang
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I was able to learn a good bit about the gang leaders and their business by just hanging
around. Over time they seemed to forget that I was even there, or maybe they just didn’t care.
By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T. and at some level I was
pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were
usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude at the fact that that I took
so such pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster.
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I was able to learn a good bit about the gang leaders and their business by just hanging
around. Over time they seemed to forget that I was even there, or maybe they just didn’t care.
By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T. and at some level I was
pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were
usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude at the fact that that I took
so such pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster.
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