The cocaine dealers, members of a South Side gang, didn’t know what to make of him. India-born, Brahmin-class Sudhir Venkatesh, wearing, that Saturday in November 1989, a tie-dye shirt, a ponytail and carrying a clipboard that held a questionnaire, clearly didn’t belong in the stairwell of a high-rise housing project in a down-and-out, black ghetto neighborhood.
They thought he might be a spy from a rival Mexican gang and threatened him with a gun and a knife. They called him “Julio.” Later he would be the “Ay-rab.” Whatever he was, he was an exotic catch, one worth holding to show their leader.
In fact, Venkatesh was recently arrived from affluent, overwhelmingly white La Jolla, Calif. He had come to the University of Chicago to take a course in sociology, though his main interest was cognitive science, the study of the brain. He was 23. The path of his life was set. After the sociology course, he’d return to California and continue studies that would lead to a career working in the quiet, safe and clean environment of a research laboratory.
Instead, the next seven years would find Venkatesh delving into the often desperate, sometimes violent lives of residents and gang members within the drab “wall” of 28 public housing towers stretching for two miles along South State Street, the notorious Robert Taylor Homes. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, at its population peak, 27,000 people lived there. His immersion into that place would become so deep that Venkatesh would, for a day, lead the gang that had threatened him in 1989. It also would bring the young academic to the fine line between deep and too deep.
While the gangbangers debated his origins and his fate, Venkatesh sat on a cold, concrete stair. He took out his questionnaire and asked: “How does it feel to be black and poor? Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good?”
The answer he got cannot be printed here, but it heralded the real beginning of his education. Then the man who would be his “professor” strode into the “classroom.”
Later, in a memoir, Venkatesh recalled the moment that would change the course of his life:
“They stopped talking when a small entourage entered the stairwell. At the front was a large man, powerfully built but with a boyish face. He also looked to be about my age, maybe a few years older, and he radiated calm. He had a toothpick or maybe a lollipop in his mouth, and it was obvious from his carriage that he was the boss.”
Now, almost 20 years later, Venkatesh is 41 and a rising star in academic circles. He’s in town from New York and his duties at Columbia University to promote his latest book, “Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.”
Over a falafel sandwich at a Lebanese restaurant near the U. of C. campus, Venkatesh recalled that when he first saw the man he calls, “J.T.,” the leader of a branch of a gang he calls the “Black Kings,” he saw something familiar.
“I had done some reading on Chicago,” he said, “from writers like Len O’Connor and Mike Royko, and I remembered how they described the powerful ward bosses, how when one would walk into the room, everybody would shut up. J.T. was just like that.”
His comparison of J.T. to a politician wasn’t far off.
Venkatesh learned the gang filled a vacuum created by a city government that mostly ignored public housing residents. The Black Kings brought order of a sort to life in the project while protecting its revenue streams — drug sales and “taxes” on local business transactions, even those as small as after-school candy sales from a lady’s apartment.
The more time Venkatesh spent with J.T., the more he realized the gang leader wasn’t interested in being a footnote in a dissertation about ghetto life. J.T. wanted to be seen as a force for good — he even somewhat justified selling crack as “keeping money in the community.” The naive young student could be his biographer, a Boswell to his Dr. Johnson — had Samuel Johnson been a crack dealer who drove a purple Chevy Malibu Classic with gold rims.At the same time, Venkatesh saw J.T. as his guide into the culture, organization and economics of a street gang, the world he desperately wanted to study. The two young men carving careers for themselves began a mutually advantageous relationship.
Active member
Venkatesh ate meals at J.T.’s mother’s table; he sat in on gang meetings. When a rival gang sped down the street spraying a hail of bullets, he helped drag a wounded gang member to safety. When some squatters living illegally in the project — and paying a tax for that to the gang — beat up a crackhead who had assaulted a girl, he helped out with a kick in the ribs.
The title of the book comes from when Venkatesh told J. T. he didn’t think being a gang leader was so hard. Try it yourself, J.T. offered. “One day,” he said, “take it or leave it.”
Venkatesh took it — with the understanding that he wouldn’t have to touch a gun or do or plan anything illegal. He would just make the rounds of the gang’s crews selling on the streets and sort out the disputes and confusions that arise among 250 young, uneducated, poorly paid and dangerous men. Mostly nothing happened. He made a few decisions that J.T. overturned, wriggled out of administering a punitive beating and that was it.
“Even though I was hanging out with drug traffickers and thieves,” Venkatesh writes, “at heart I felt like I was just being a good sociologist.”
Was he? Or had he gotten so close to his subjects that he had lost objectivity? “Gang Leader for a Day,” seems to indicate that maybe he had. He says no, and a previous book, “American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto” contains much more of the statistical data that gives balance to the recently published memoir.
In Venkatesh’s first three years with the Black Kings, he didn’t have formal advisers at the university. “In grad school,” he said, “you are largely left to your own devices until you write an official dissertation proposal.” During that time, he attended classes, read books on poverty and hung with the gang in what he looks back on as a “weird, quasi-double life.”
One day in 1992, in his life outside the gang and the ghetto, Venkatesh was playing golf with the most eminent scholar on race and poverty in America, the U. of C.’s William Julius Wilson. Wilson, who now is at Harvard, then headed the project for which Venkatesh was gathering data. He recalls the conversation in his book.
“Sudhir, you’re worrying me,” Wilson told him, “and I would really want you to think about spending some time with others.”
Venkatesh understood that to mean, “observe anyone but gangbangers.” He explains: “Only when I began sharing my experiences with my advisers and showing them my field notes, did I begin to understand — and adhere to — the reporting requirements for researchers who are privy to criminal conduct, but before then, with little understanding of these protocols, I simply relied on my moral compass.”
In an exchange of letters with Chicago author Alex Kotlowitz that appears on the Slate web site, Venkatesh expands on the protocols: “My universities sponsor my research, and they are adamant that I limit the risk to ‘human subjects.’ This usually means changing names, obtaining signed approval, and ensuring that subjects can pull out of my research projects (at any time for any reason). I conduct research through some combination of ‘participation-observation’ and interviewing. … I am allowed to make relationships — indeed, ethnographers [scientists who study people’s daily lives through direct contact] believe that participating in the world being studied is an excellent way of understanding that world.”
Northwestern University sociologist Mary Pattillo, who also was Wilson’s student, though a few years behind Venkatesh, said: “Scholars know that ethnographers will walk a fine line between immersion and detachment. This is what makes our work rich but still sociological. We respect people’s negotiation of that line, and there is an honor code, as well as an official institutional review process about upholding certain ethical principles while in the field.”
An indication of how far the “field” could be from the ivory tower came to Venkatesh on July 2, 1995. “That was the day I’ll never forget,” he said, “the day of the second drive-by. The first time, everybody got down but me. Later people tried to teach me to bend my knees at the first sound of a shot, but the lessons were for nothing. I froze. I looked around and everyone but me had a gun out. There were 12-year-olds who had been riding their bikes in front of the building, and suddenly they had guns in their hands.”
For months, he stayed frozen in his “rogue” research, keeping away from the gang and the Taylor Homes. When he returned, things had changed. Relationships built over years were becoming strained; “Residents took the absence to mean that I was working for the police or the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority] or someone,” he said. Adding to the new chilliness toward him was the fact that J.T. had tricked him into interviewing residents about their underground economy. J.T. turned that information into “taxes.” Also J.T. was beginning to realize that Venkatesh hadn’t been primarily interested in writing a biography of him. All around, relationships built over years were becoming strained.
Academia’s pull
In 1996, he got a fellowship at Harvard, then a job offer from Columbia. He left Chicago. In the book, he writes about what he then saw in the mirror: “Gone were the tie-dyed shirts and the ponytail, replaced by the kind of clothes befitting an edgy young Ivy League professor. And also a leather briefcase.”
In 1998, when he was back in town on a visit, Venkatesh met with J.T. on a freezing November day. Half of the Taylor Homes had been demolished with the rest soon to follow. In the parking lot, J.T. handed him a note of introduction to a gang leader back East. Part way down the page, a phrase jumped out: “He’s with me.”
Venkatesh remembers smiling when he read that.
With the demolition of the Taylor Homes, residents (some of the gang’s best drug customers) and gang members (many of whom were residents as well) scattered. J.T. tried to recruit new members in other parts of the city, but the kids weren’t products of the projects. They didn’t get what it had meant to be a gangbanger. On one of his visits back to Chicago, Venkatesh went along on a recruitment attempt in the predominantly black West Pullman neighborhood and recalls the experience in his book.
“My auntie said I should ask if she could join also,” one kid asked. “Are you kidding me?” J.T. said. Another asked: “Is there some kind of training and do we get paid to go? I got to be at White Castle on Mondays and Thursdays, and my mama says if I lose that job, she’ll kick me out of the house.” J.T. walked to his car kicking stones into the air.
After a few years, J.T. went straight, managed a dry cleaning business for a while. He opened a barber shop, but it failed. Like many a CEO whose company has been pulled out from under him, he did a little consulting work — for remaining gangs.
“J.T. became,” Venkatesh said, and he paused, looking for just the right word, “deflated.”
Venkatesh was driven to the 4600 block on South State Street to be photographed amid the vast open space that lies where the Robert Taylor Homes used to be. We pulled into the parking lot, the only physical reminder of where years of his life had been spent, where he and another ambitious young man had gone about their vastly different businesses and where his career had been launched.
“Back then, this area would be teeming with life,” he said. “There’d be kids playing in the water from a fire hydrant.” He stopped and chuckled. “I can’t believe I’m romanticizing that place.”
– – –
More about the scholar
“Gang Leader for a Day” (Penguin Press, 2008), is Sudhir Venkatesh’s memoir of time spent with a Chicago gang. His documentary film, “Dislocation,” follows families displaced from condemned public housing developments. It aired on PBS in 2005.
Venkatesh, 41, is assistant professor of sociology, Columbia University; director of research at Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies; co-director, Youth and Globalization Research Network, Social Science Research Council. His research has focused on urban neighborhoods in New York, Chicago and Paris.
He is completing a project on prostitution with University of Chicago economist (and co-author of “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”) Steven Levitt.
———-
cleroux@tribune.com
