Class projects

Many readers of the best-seller Freakonomics were startled by the anecdote of a naive Indian graduate student who, in the ’80s, was briefly taken captive by a drug gang in a South Side housing project. Sudhir Venkatesh was that guy.

He was trying to administer a poverty survey for University of Chicago professor William Julius Wilson, and that encounter led to some startling observations of urban life and the underground economy (for instance, that crack selling was a surprisingly low-wage business). But it also generated the narrative of his new book, Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press, $25.95). This plainspoken, acute academic memoir—a hilarious, disturbing and revealing account of a little-discussed urban landscape—could become one of the year’s more talked-about books.

Venkatesh developed an improbable friendship with J.T., a low-key yet charismatic leader of the Black Kings, one of many gangs prospering via the crack economy of the 1980s. His experience recalls that time, and a rawer Chicago. The association with J.T. allowed him to observe the full spectrum of life in the Robert Taylor Homes, and to begin to address, as a sociologist, how the poor survive.

“J.T. always made the point to me that what goes on in his neighborhood goes on in every neighborhood in the city,” says Venkatesh, now a professor of sociology at Columbia University. “I’d say, ‘The gangs aren’t shooting one another, and people aren’t extorting store owners.’ He’d look at me like I was so naive.”

While Freakonomics famously examined the rationale of drug dealing, Venkatesh takes a broader approach. He investigates a community that is “saturated with illegal activity,” and what that does to the community. It’s a scholarly, nonvoyeuristic peek into the lives of families that most of society chooses to ignore.

“There’s nothing that surprising about what I did, other than that I spent time with people we otherwise wouldn’t look at twice,” he says.While Venkatesh’s discovery of the urban underworld seems singular, he was perhaps the least likely candidate for the gig: a math major who had come to U. of C. from California.

“[It] get me into the world and seeing things like race or politics,” he says, “things that in a Southern California suburb weren’t so clear. ”Gang Leader seems destined to garner controversy. The section dealing with the aftermath of Robert Taylor’s demolition is heartbreaking, and elsewhere Venkatesh precisely limns the many small Faustian bargains the urban poor strike daily to survive. He’s only the latest in a long line of Chicago School sociologists to examine our urban underclass (as he acknowledges), but even so, Gang Leader is urgent-seeming stuff, decoding some of the mysteries of race, class, crime and violence that in so many ways define this city.

“I’m interested in how people try to be moral and just and do the right thing in the context of being very poor, and having to make tough decisions,” Venkatesh says. “They don’t really trust the police, they ultimately have to solve problems themselves. I was interested in the moral questions of what people do to survive. I learned that a lot of people in these communities are invisible, but have skills of diplomacy and mediation. They are assets. But we don’t look to the inner city to find assets, but rather as a place of deficits.”

Gang Leader for a Day is available now.