In Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets author and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes nearly a decade spent in Chicago's Robert Taylor housing projects, interacting with members of the Black Kings, a gang that sold crack cocaine during the late 1980s and 1990s.
Having blundered into the gang's turf at the beginning of a seemingly innocuous sociology project, Venkatesh wound up being befriended by the local gang leader. The result of this was an opportunity to get an inside look at the inner workings of a drug dealing street gang, from the economics of selling drugs to the management of the gang's foot soldiers, and virtually every aspect besides.
The book is a fascinating read; Venkatesh is a very talented author who manages to make this work of non-fiction completely engrossing. We learn of his own moral struggles with being in the presence of men who are planning to kill rival gang members, we glimpse the surprisingly human side of the monstrous gang members themselves, and we hear some of the stories of the supporting cast of characters living in the projects.
One truth becomes painfully clear as you read this book: 'Poor Black America' is headed nowhere fast. The reasons for this are complex, but they can be boiled down to this: poor blacks in many cases are their own worst enemies. Venkatesh documents how a maleficent housing coordinator routinely shakes down the residents of the projects for the sin of being entrepreneurial; how the gangs are allowed to operate amongst otherwise law-abiding people because they have been paid off, and how bringing the police in to deal with the criminals can be as hazardous as taking matters into one's own hands would be. The situation Venkatesh lays out in the book would be ridiculous to the point of comical if it weren't so sad and so utterly devoid of hope. People living in white neighborhoods would be outraged if asked to endure conditions such as these that are routinely accepted as part of day to day life in the Chicago projects.
This book was an accidental find; a library search for 'Freakonomics' turned it up as a related work. Although it just came out this year, it somehow had found anonymity among the stacks upstairs in the library, instead of being featured as a new book alongside all of the anti-George Bush/Iraq War books that are the more routine fare on the 'new book' shelves.
Not only do I recommend this book, I strongly encourage you; hell I implore you to read it.
Listen to audio of Venkatesh reading an excerpt from the book on NPR
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Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets ISBN 1594201501; Penguin Press, 2008. Hardcover, 320 pages. $25.95
