Summary Of Gang Leader For A Day

As a REACH member, I had the privilege of witnessing a support group for substance abusers and alcoholics. One man, in particular, spoke of his addiction to cocaine. I listened to his speech that described his introduction to the substance, the hardships he faced, and his slow but successful recovery. I, though, had one question in mind: to what measures will users and even sellers go for drugs? Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader For a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets answers my question. This memoir enables the reader to experience the work gangs put in to sell their product. By following and occasionally participating in Black King’s jobs, most directly with its leader J.T., Venkatesh searches for answers at the Robert Taylor Homes

Together Venkatesh and Hinojosa-Smith demonstrate how a person’s exposure to a group of people or region can alter how that place or those individuals are perceived and portrayed.
The traditions and operations of a group show how some individuals and locations are different than what meets the eye. In Gang Leader For a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, it is apparent the Black Kings set up their operations by organizing where a person is stationed on the streets. Additionally, the memoir includes the ranking of the gang’s leaders, the numerous shootouts, and competition between Chicago’s gangs. By showing this, Venkatesh portrays that each gang has

Venkatesh dives deeper into Robert Taylor and learns of the poverty of the building. He discovers, with the help of the tenet Ms. Bailey, that the accepted belief that the uneducated are incapable of successfully providing for themselves, let alone others, is untrue. Ms. Bailey shows Venkatesh that without much schooling she is able to maintain order and ensure that no child goes hungry or cold. From his encounter with Ms. Bailey, Venkatesh realizes that life in the projects of Robert Taylor is unlike the suburbs, “... Not only was it harder, but it was utterly unpredictable, which necessitated a different set of rules for getting by. And living in a building with a powerful tenet leader, as hard as that life would be, was slightly less hard” (Venkatesh 183). The poor have different responsibilities than the wealthy because they are constantly in need of survival necessities. Venkatesh witnesses and slowly realizes that the impoverished have more burdens to bear than one would think; thus, he relentlessly works to show the reader how the common belief is wrong. Moreover, while the idea of hardships may apply, the use of his history help Hinojosa-Smith falsify the idea that historical background is not necessary to understand a place. Hinojosa-Smith states that his childhood of orally learning the history of the people of the Rio Grande “helped to cement further still our knowing exactly