Gang Leader For A Day: Sudhir Venkatesh

THE first time that Sudhir Venkatesh witnessed a drive-by shooting, he remained upright while everyone around him dropped to the pavement. “I just stood there,” he says. “Like a tree.” Venkatesh is a tall man – a big target. He would have been even harder to miss back then, almost 20 years ago, when he was a hippyish middle-class sociology student with a long ponytail and a tie-dyed t-shirt, conducting field research in Chicago’s biggest, poorest housing project, the Robert Taylor Homes. Some of the residents, concerned or even embarrassed that this outsider could have been killed during one of his regular visits, began training Venkatesh in drive-by preparedness. “They went through a series of exercises with me,” he says, “breaking Coke bottles so I would get used to the popping sound and start bending my knees.

“Eventually, it happened again. My second drive-by. I remember the screech of the tyres, and I knew what was coming, and everyone was shouting, ‘get down, get down’, and I froze. Again. I just fucking stood there when the car came past me, shooting. Thank God these guys have no aim whatsoever.” Venkatesh spent the best part of a decade dividing his time, and his life, between the Robert Taylor Homes and the University of Chicago, having arrived from suburban California in 1989 and made it his business to quantify the economics of the ghetto. “In grad school,” he says, “you’re left alone for a few years to go out and find something to study. A lot had happened before I met my advisors to show them my notes, and that’s when they said, okay, you shouldn’t be doing this.”

His new memoir, Gang Leader For A Day, recounts how Venkatesh built his career on those notes, gathering enough material for his graduate thesis, a number of further research papers, and two previous books – American Project: The Rise And Fall Of A Modern Ghetto (2000) and Off The Books: The Underground Economy Of The Urban Poor (2006). But first, he established himself in the long and noble tradition of highly educated minds whose wisdom does not remotely apply at street level, by turning up at the Robert Taylor projects with a clipboard and a survey that began, “How does it feel to be black and poor?” The available answers were multiple choice: “very bad”, “somewhat bad”, “neither bad nor good”, “somewhat good”, or “very good.” He can see why a reader might find this funny, but at the time he wasn’t trying to be, and wasn’t received as such by the gang members who initially mistook him for one of their Mexican enemies, pulling knives and guns before he could even ask them. To be fair to Venkatesh, he didn’t write the questions.

“I was young,” he says, a little defensively. “I was trying my hardest to be a sociologist. I made mistakes, but often because I was following sociology protocols. And as bad as that survey was, I would defy your readers to go through the painful exercise of finding out the questions behind most modern polls. They’re equally absurd, and yet they form the statistical portraits of who we are, which are taken as fact.” He was spared by a gang leader known as JT, a young black man about his own age, who effectively functioned as local branch manager for the Black Kings, a citywide street gang that administered the projects, taxing and policing the residents while trading in crack and heroin. JT became his patron, presuming that Venkatesh would in turn become his biographer. This is probably not the book he had in mind, but it does tell the story of their problematic friendship.

The title itself refers to the time JT conducted his own sociological experiment by letting Venkatesh – the relatively privileged and admittedly naïve son of Indian expatriates – take command for a day. Invited to decide if and how two subordinates should be punished for a minor misappropriation of drug funds, this new acting boss suggested meekly that they be made to do “20 push-ups or 50 squat thrusts”. This, again, reads like comedy, until JT settles the matter with a beating, not the first or last that Venkatesh was to witness in the course of his research. At one point he even helped to subdue a violent pimp with a kick to the stomach. Hence the book’s subtitle: A Rogue Sociologist Crosses The Line. The publishers added that, he says, along with an introduction by Stephen Dubner, co-author of the bestselling pop-thesis Freakonomics, which included a chapter on Venkatesh’s work. Freakonomics is given prominent mention on the cover of Gang Leader For A Day, beneath a tough-looking cover photo emphasising what Dubner describes as his “overdeveloped curiosity [and] underdeveloped sense of fear”.

“I guess I’m a part of that brand now,” he says. “But hopefully not in a cynical way. Freakonomics told a lot of people what sociologists do.” At the same time, he admits that most sociologists don’t do what he does. Most don’t even approve. In purely academic terms, “crossing the line” refers not so much to his putting himself in dangerous situations, as to his forming relationships that might invalidate his data. “I am one of the black sheep of my discipline, because I go live with people and talk to them. I might be open to bias or, God forbid, make emotional connections. Only a few of us do this kind of work, and we’re constantly fighting to prove the value of it.” Venkatesh describes his method as “hanging out”. He has recently been using it to study the black markets of suburban Paris, which have become many immigrants’ only possible means of employment.

He also hangs out with sex workers in New York and Chicago, as part of an ongoing joint project with Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt. And when he can, he watches current episodes of The Wire with self-described “thugs” from Harlem, soliciting their opinions on its veracity for a regular blog in the New York Times.

(He hasn’t hung out much in the UK, but keeps up with “the academic literature”. “I am struck by the growing presence of guns in street-based violence, in a country that has no real history of them,” he says. “And also, by your second and third generation immigrants, who seem to feel alienated from the only society they know. That can lead to unrest if not adequately responded to … “) Back when Venkatesh was “rolling” with the Black Kings, as he puts it, he had not yet refined this technique to distinguish between himself and the people now he refers to, with respect, as “subjects”. The gangsters, squatters, prostitutes, addicts and concerned residents of the Robert Taylor Homes gave him much more than information, because they came to believe that he was one of them. “Either you’re with us,” JT told him once, “or you’re just here to look around.” His book suggests that it wasn’t that simple. Today, Venkatesh makes repeated use of the phrase “shades of grey” to describe both his own legal and ethical position at the time, and his understanding of the characters described in Gang Leader For A Day. Pootchie, for example, the Black Kings member who confessed that he would rather be a dancer. “Jazz, tap, all of it … ” Or T-Bone, the Black Kings’ bookkeeper, who gave Venkatesh the ledgers that detailed the gang’s revenues and expenses in full – raw material which he drew on heavily for his own published work.

“Here is a guy who was managing the accounts of a crack dealing gang,” he says. “That fact alone would make most people feel that there’s no reason to pay any attention to this person, or shed a tear if he dies or goes to prison. But if I can tell you more about him – that he had a college degree, and a family, that he had made mistakes and he was conflicted – maybe we can see him in shades of grey. I think he was looking for salvation, or at least expiation, in giving me those books. He wanted to absolve himself of a certain guilt, which I’m not sure he did.”

T-Bone later died in prison. And Venkatesh has his own guilt. “I don’t really regret what I did, or how I did it, but I do feel guilt, every day, about the fact that I don’t live in poverty, but I write about people who do. These issues are better spoken about than buried, yet most academics – and journalists – don’t have the space to raise them. What is my relationship to the people I’m studying? How am I benefiting from them? How do I defend my work, and my role?

“The only thing I can do is keep talking and writing about these people. I’m under no illusion that I can solve poverty or make anyone’s life better, but can at least tell their stories. Some are humorous, or even joyous, some are violent and sad. By bringing those stories out for public view, we make them part of our conciousness.”

JT, meanwhile, is still around, and in touch. Has he read Gang Leader For A Day? “I know he has not. He’s waiting for me to give him a signed copy when I’m next in Chicago. I have no idea what he thinks, and I’m nervous about it. The inscription in the book reads ‘Be careful what you wish for’. We’ll see if he really wanted a biography.”

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