Gang Leader for a Day
Sudhir Venkatesh,
Allen Lane 4.99 pounds
A rogue sociologist experiences life in the inner city

Sudhir venkatesh, then a student of sociology researching urban poverty at the University of Chicago, spent many years from 1989 hanging around with a gang leader in the Robert Taylor Homes project, a huge housing project gone awry and was subsequently torn down. This book is the story of his association with J.T., a leader of Black Kings who trafficked in crack cocaine.

As J.T. opened up to Venkatesh, drawing him into his home where his mother would always have a plateful of vegetarian food for the scholar and taking him on rounds, it was almost as if a parallel universe opened up.
The narration is remarkably wide-eyed. It could be because of the academic environment Venkatesh comes from. Sample the questionnaire he takes on his first forays into the housing project. “How does it feel to be black and poor?” he asks. “Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good.” Predictably, he draws laughter. When the choice is put to J.T., he answers: “I’m not black… I’m not African-American either. I’m a nigger… Niggers are the ones who live in this building… African-Americans live in the suburbs. African-Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.” Then J.T. asks, “How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?”

J.T. offers to show Venkatesh what he’s about. It takes a recap of American inner-city crime of the 1980s and 1990s to know the boundaries he was crossing for his “research”: “During my first weeks at the University of Chicago I had to attend a variety of orientation sessions. In each one... we were warned not to walk outside the areas that were actively patrolled by the university’s police force… even the lovely parks across the border were off-limits.” It was in those parks that Venkatesh finds company amid out-of-work African-Americans, who guide him to the housing project.

Venkatesh never loses a sense of awe at the stories he’s stumbled into. Some of that — though it is surprising that his ethnographer’s eyes do not explicitly see — has to do with his own ethnicity, his very different trajectory as a member of an immigrant group that is expected to do well for himself.
When Venkatesh tells his parents that he’d like to study sociology at university, his father is aghast that he’s giving up a good South Asian goal, a degree in bio-engineering. By way of compromise, he majors in theoretical mathematics. When he again shows inclination for sociology at graduate school, his father is resigned to it, but he counsels him to diligently read all the course material that’s recommended, not just what the professor says.

“I have a few sociology classes… in college,” says J.T. to Venkatesh in their first conversation. Why it turned out so differently for the two of them is the story told between the lines in this book. Venkatesh first found fame when his work was cited in Freakonomics, the bestselling book by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Something about Gang Leader for a Day gives the assurance that it will soon be the subject of a big film.