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Book Review
Looking beyond the ordinary
Sudeep Chakravarti
GANG LEADER FOR A DAY — A Rogue Sociologist Crosses the Line: Sudhir Venkatesh; Allen Lane, Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. £ 4.99
Sudhir Venkatesh is an outstanding example of incongruous as normal. First, imagine an Indian American boy, vegetarian, budding social scientist, taking his university instructor’s suggestion literally: to study urban poverty in Chicago, he should spend time at a sprawling public housing complex stacked to its high-rise rafters inhabited primarily by African Americans. Then, imagine this boy actually heading there, being kidnapped by a gang, then befriending the gang leader, and spending the next 10 years or so commuting to the innards of a society where ‘nigger’ is still a politically correct term. “Niggers are the ones who live in this building,” JT, an aspiring gang leader with the Black Kings tells Venkatesh. “African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.”
Thin divide
In his own way, JT also tells the young sociologist-in-training to pack his clipboard and questionnaires and go away somewhere nicer, where the world neatly responds to questions in multiple choices. Or, as Venkatesh “ain’t going to learn shit with this thing,” stick around the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side, specifically Building 4040, JT’s turf, and see how the really poor, really dispossessed, really done in, live. A place where police don’t come for law and order; ambulances don’t come for the sick; public officials never visit after ensuring poor African Americans have been housed as far away as possible from there predominantly white neighbours. It’s a thin divide: across the park, in the lush environs of University of Chicago, gentle academia. On the other side, bullets talk instead of semantics, gangs and their economy of crack-cocaine, prostitution, even payback to bribe a housing official to fix a door — crucial, or a home can be robbed, female relatives raped. A place where unemployment is so high and incomes so low some householders stash drugs in their homes for a fee, and the complex’s social workers feed and clothe the absolutely poor by cadging donations from gangs.
‘Rogue sociologist’
This became Venkatesh’s life in the late1980s and much of the 1990s; a place where the present-day professor of sociology and African-American studies at New York’s Columbia University earned his programme credits, and perhaps far more importantly, street ‘cred’. The fact that he stuck doggedly to his subject, fascinated and learning in turn, is a sign of remarkable attitude and fearlessness. He sometimes did this, as he admits, against advice from his university mentors and friends that he was getting in too deep, beyond the rational call of academic interest.
As one among his many readers and admirers, I’m absolutely delighted that he did, as Gang Leader for a Day is an object lesson for anyone who wishes to look beyond the ordinary, to tell a story by taking risks, ditching armchair travelling to soak up, understand and tell the story of the real world. That he conducted his primary research as a self-professed ‘rogue sociologist’ in the 1980s, and that it took until 2008 to publish these experiences is nearly irrelevant, as it displays the fears and helplessness of a massive section of American society that is today, relatively, as far from living the American Dream as their forefathers were when they got off slave boats from Western Africa.
There are many highlights in the book. Venkatesh’s interactions with JT, his mother who whips up food for the always-hungry Venkatesh, and Ms. Bailey — the prima donna and supreme fixer of one of the buildings in the complex — the rogue cop Jerry, the junkie-prostitute Clarisse, and T-Bone, who wants to study and works in JT’s gang to earn his keep in academia, but winds up dead in jail. The day JT, exasperated at his questioning of his brutal, clinical style, offers him a chance at running JT’s gang for a day, is the highlight of this work of highlights. So everyday, and yet, remarkable.
It matters little that he has used aliases for nearly every one of his subjects to protect his sources, and their livelihoods and lives. The story is gritty, real, refereed. The humour, concern, daily hopes and gut-wrenching hopelessness are too real even for the land that has learnt to manufacture reality so well. Such a work forces one to confront the unsavoury amidst glossy plenty, and to those who care, hopefully trigger a response for thought and action to do something about it.
Revelatory
This book is an engaging, disturbing, revelatory read for any inquiring mind. But in particular I would recommend this book to a student of sociology, or a student and practitioner of journalism. Perhaps more importantly, to those who teach or critique blindly. As any combative writer knows, it’s a battle of beliefs as well as budgets. Through this, he exposes myths and underbellies.
As for the corruption-ridden poverty lands of Chicago, Robert Taylor Homes, circa Venkatesh, are now demolished, and its people, still unsightly and unwelcome, moved even further away. Tragically, such stories are legion in America. On the other hand, there is Venkatesh and the tribe of truth-sayers he so emphatically belongs to.
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