Books: Gang Leader for a Day
by rrusczyk, May 19, 2008, 1:09 PM
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh.
Venkatesh was a grad student in sociology at the University of Chicago when he started visiting the projects there to interview people for research. He quickly found what anyone with an ounce of common sense could have told him: someone wandering into the projects from the University of Chicago asking questions is lucky if the only thing that happens to him is getting ignored. So, he shelved the academia interviews and just hung out with the people there over a few years, most notably one of the main gang leaders in the area. What results may not be valuable research in an academic sense, but instead, something likely more valuable -- a small window into a world that many in the U.S. are fortunate to never have to endure.
By necessity, it is a very small window. I think it's pretty hard to walk in another's shoes when they are so different than our own. But it was an interesting view, nonetheless. I've read a lot of these social-science-esque books in the last 10 years, and most of them suffer a fatal flaw of letting their moralizing get in the way of their reporting. Venkatesh does a very good job of avoiding this for the most part. He spends more time wondering about the morality of his own actions than he does moralizing about society as a whole.
What emerges is about what you'd expect -- a world few of us would want to live in, and a world that those born to it have little hope of escaping. He doesn't offer solutions (which is good -- that should be done in wholly different books), and I'm not confident anyone has any good solutions to the problems these people face. I'd start by ending/changing the war on drugs to focus on treatment rather than incarceration, but even that would take 1-2 generations to take effect. And good luck getting any politician to support such an approach. This book also reinforces my conviction that focusing on education as the solution to these people's problems is a short-term misallocation of resources. There needs to be a functional society in place in order for effective education to transpire. Kids and parents in these neighborhoods are too worried about food, shelter, and fighting addiction and poverty to maintain focus on education. Indeed, much of the progress of humanity in the last 3-4 centuries is mainly a story of technology enabling a larger and larger portion of people to move past these fundamental struggles and focus more on growth than on mere survival. This book is a firm reminder that even in our own country, not everyone has this luxury.
Venkatesh was a grad student in sociology at the University of Chicago when he started visiting the projects there to interview people for research. He quickly found what anyone with an ounce of common sense could have told him: someone wandering into the projects from the University of Chicago asking questions is lucky if the only thing that happens to him is getting ignored. So, he shelved the academia interviews and just hung out with the people there over a few years, most notably one of the main gang leaders in the area. What results may not be valuable research in an academic sense, but instead, something likely more valuable -- a small window into a world that many in the U.S. are fortunate to never have to endure.
By necessity, it is a very small window. I think it's pretty hard to walk in another's shoes when they are so different than our own. But it was an interesting view, nonetheless. I've read a lot of these social-science-esque books in the last 10 years, and most of them suffer a fatal flaw of letting their moralizing get in the way of their reporting. Venkatesh does a very good job of avoiding this for the most part. He spends more time wondering about the morality of his own actions than he does moralizing about society as a whole.
What emerges is about what you'd expect -- a world few of us would want to live in, and a world that those born to it have little hope of escaping. He doesn't offer solutions (which is good -- that should be done in wholly different books), and I'm not confident anyone has any good solutions to the problems these people face. I'd start by ending/changing the war on drugs to focus on treatment rather than incarceration, but even that would take 1-2 generations to take effect. And good luck getting any politician to support such an approach. This book also reinforces my conviction that focusing on education as the solution to these people's problems is a short-term misallocation of resources. There needs to be a functional society in place in order for effective education to transpire. Kids and parents in these neighborhoods are too worried about food, shelter, and fighting addiction and poverty to maintain focus on education. Indeed, much of the progress of humanity in the last 3-4 centuries is mainly a story of technology enabling a larger and larger portion of people to move past these fundamental struggles and focus more on growth than on mere survival. This book is a firm reminder that even in our own country, not everyone has this luxury.
February 2012
January 2012