Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets | Sudhir Venkatesh

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets | Sudhir Venkatesh | Unusual Candor from a Sociologist

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Gang Leader for a ...

	Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets Sudhir Venkatesh Penguin Press HC, The, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 52 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Anatomy of "Trickle-down" Corruption U.S. style or (The Missing Half of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance")

What do Americans do when they have been so marginalized that their life options are cut off at the knees and narrowed down to a trickle: so much so that they have nowhere to turn to subsist, but to crime and corruption; where there are no social services; everywhere there is drug addiction, despair, misery and public violence; tensions are so "hair trigger" that every incident becomes a potential Defcon 5 event; only corrupt police will enter your communities; kids attend dilapidated schools that teach nothing; they are often killed by drive-by-shootings, and parenting is so poor that it amounts to societal negligence; even charities don't show up; no grass or trees or flowers will grow; there are no pets: only the ubiquitous smell of urine, vomit, and used condoms in the stairwells; and the neighborhoods are "isolated in plain sight," plopped down hard in the middle of unimaginable affluence?

Sounds like a cruel cultural joke, written for one of Adous Huxley's futuristic Science Fiction tales, doesn't it? Welcome to any high-rise housing project in the USA. University of Chicago grad student (from UC San Diego, by way of India, Sudhir Venkatest) gives answers to how this could happen the "old fashion or ethnographic way:" By living among such people. This book is an informal status report to renowned Sociologist and University Professor William Julius Wilson, of almost 6-years of Venkatest living and traveling with his host, a gang leader "JT," of the Black Kings gang. It is a report of the author's research, as he participated in the "off-the-books" economy of "trickle-down corruption" as it was being practiced in the Robert Taylor "housing project" of southwest Chicago.

The research seeks to answer the deeper overall question of: How these things can be allowed to happen in the richest nation in the world? The subtext of this book gives a two-part answer to that question: one part is Oscar Lewis' "Culture of Poverty;" the other part is what Gary Webb called the "Dark Alliance": that is, the unlikely intersection between the well-regulated system of "trickle-down cocaine corruption," and Lewis' "Culture of Poverty:" two companion systems of misery that descend upon the poor like locust doing a plague, and that the rest of America has learned to turn a blind eye to, so long as they exist and operate only in certain lower class communities.

Both parts only seem to come fully into play when things begin to fall between the cracks of the larger economy. And here we get to see at ground level just how big those cracks can get when Oscar Lewis' so called "high risk irresponsible" cultural behavior (referred to in America's ghettoes as "hustling") intersects with "low risk high leverage cocaine corruption" -- and then the two parts are allowed to intermix and metastasize along the economic and social grids of America's black poor.

Both this book and Webb's book "Dark Alliance" should be sold and read as a companion set of a two-part American tragedy about how America's two parallel universes, one black and the other white, are connected by a wormhole of "trickle-down drug-based corruption." Both books are harrowing stories of how cocaine, operating simultaneously at both ends of the political spectrum, has turned one nation, divided by color, upside down, morally.

Webb's book, "Dark Alliance" is about how the "Just Say No to Drugs" Reagan administration actually set off the "crack cocaine explosion" that fueled the inner city social meltdown discussed in Venkatest's book. That explosion, if one can believe Webb's account, appears to have been a carefully orchestrated dumping of hundreds of tons of the white powder into the black inner cities in exchange for sending the proceeds to the "Nicaraguan Contras." In this sense, the book is a story about how the other end of the cocaine pipeline worked: about the carnage Oliver North's devilishly clever but hypocritical "cocaine strategy" reaped on the inner cities of the U.S. and about how one mid-level gang functionary, "JT," and his cohorts in the Robert Taylor Housing Project, turned the Reagan supplied cocaine into crack and used it to ply their trade, and to provide, as best they could, the services that otherwise should have been provided by the city of Chicago. Not surprisingly, Webb's book also tells a similar story about "JT's" entrepreneur LA gang counterpart, called "Freeway Ricky Ross."

Venkatest's book continues this saga independently, as it paints in bold relief, a stark picture of the two Americas predicted a generation ago by the Kerner Commission Report: one black and one white; one content and satisfied with America's status quo racial arrangements; the other teetering on existential chaos and extinction, as a result of them: One that is completely insensitive to the long and the short-term effects and consequences of racism; while the other continues to experience its secondary and brutal effects up close and personal everyday.

What Venkatest's book demonstrates more than anything else is that insensitivity to what racism is doing, and has done to American humanity, is rapidly becoming the most obvious and enduring symbol of a very twisted American reality: an increasingly diminished, socially dead overly consummerized and commodified way of life, permanently deformed by a carefully hidden reliance on racism, and on racist denial.

It is easy enough for the reader to get side-tracked by the many colorful (and extremely funny) incidents of day-to-day gang life that the author describes, including being a gang leader for a day - where he discovered that the job itself was no walk in the park. But there are no heroes in either this story, or that told by Gary Webb: only the exposure of a villainous systemic form of corruption, the distribution and selling of crack cocaine. It is difficult if not impossible to ignore the larger tableau, which paints graphically, a much larger and darker, much more disturbing, much more sinister, more socially twisted and grotesque, intentional, passive-aggressive, and mean-spirited picture of a culture of neglect by one of the richest but domestically most socially insensitive and socially negligent and uncaring nations in the world.

What is even more disturbing, (than the incidents in the book are colorful and funny), is that everything that happens in the "dystopia of the Robert Taylor projects" is happening in the black part of every other inner city in America. Professor Venkatesh's book demonstrates that American culture is becoming a checkerboard of "black dystopias" interlaced within "white utopias" and as my new best friend P.K Ryan would say: that appears to be the way America wants it. Period: beginning and end of the American racial story.

However, disturbing, this is the way good sociology should be done: methodologically clean, pulling no punches, and close to the ground. I have already bought Professor Venkatesh's two other books. Five stars.

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Unusual Candor from a Sociologist

I've never bought the myth that sociologists are neutral, disinterested observers of other people's cultures. That's a key part of the appeal I find in this book: Venkatesh is bluntly honest about his own naivete, and his own "hustling" to get what he needed from the people in the projects he studied. He recognized he's no disinterested observer.

He also recognizes the interest the people he studies have in outside recognition, and the impact his presence has on others--one sequence toward the end is shockingly naive--but Venkatesh doesn't censor information that cast a bad light on himself, or hide the negative impact he had on people's lives. In other words, he's no Margaret Mead--and that's all to the good. This should be required reading for anyone who wants to go into sociology.

He's blunt about the 3rd-world-esque corruption in Chicago and about police corruption, which should be familiar to residents of any big city with open eyes. He's also blunt about the ineptness of the Chicago Housing Authority. He also shows how people in bad circumstances display ingenuity and selflessness to make the best of a bad situation.

The saddest portion of this story is the fate of people who, had they been born elsewhere (or let's face it, been born white), would've been on a one-way express ticket to the top.

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A MUST READ for EVERYONE

I finished reading this book over one weekend--putting it down only for breakfast, lunch and dinner! Author Venkatesh took a very big risk in this venture into the "other" world; I think he was very lucky to connect with the gang leader JT who himself had some college education. This vital connection was a valuable "shield" for him, but for which he himself would have become a statistic very early in the venture. I hope this work will open the eyes of sociologists in formulating strategies for redeeming the unfortunate kids who fall into this trap of "easy money." May God bless you, Venkatesh. Keep up the good work!

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gang life sociology

Thus book starts out somewhat weak, and that mimics the author's personality and character when he stars this research. By the end of the book, he is sure of himself and the book is better compiled as well. This is a good read and a good insight into a drug life that is made more commonplace. The indication of how the cops profit as well is know and shown again here.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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