Analysis Of Gang Leader For A Day By Sudhir Venkatesh

After many mixtapes and nearing the edge of household name status, Maryland rapper Logic drops his first album. In this album is a song titled Gang Related. This song tells the story of what environment and household he grew up in. His brother is in a gang and sells cocaine to his father in front of him. Logic's mother is in an out of mental institutions, all the while logic is growing up and trying not to get shot when he walks outside. With drugs and gangs all around him, it is quite amazing that he got out and become a famous rapper. Gang Related also has a core message of stopping the violence, which leads to a question, is this song about his story or a message about ending the violence?

In the book, Gang Leader for a Day, a rogue sociologist passionately dives into the lives of one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects in an attempt to develop an insight as to how the urban impoverished lived. Throughout the text it becomes clear that a conflict paradigm is being reflected. A conflict society is based on social inequality, in which some individuals benefit and thrive more than others, which tends to lead to conflict and thus change. This is evident both in the housing projects where a gang known as the “Black Kings” take over and also in the surrounding neighborhoods where the more elite citizens, including persons from the authors university, shy away from associating with the nearby poor black nearby public, thus

In the book, Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology student from the University of Chicago starts out simply trying to understand “how it feels to be poor and black,” and ends up spending years and years figuring out the ins and outs of a gang society (Venkatesh 14). Sudhir receives the chance of a sociologist’s lifetime to see first-hand what life is like in the projects. He follows gang leader, J.T. around and studies his life at the Robert Taylor homes for years. Throughout Venkatesh’s experience he witnesses many things some people go a lifetime without seeing. For example, he was no stranger to seeing people use drugs or get beat up by gang members. One interesting aspect of Venkatesh’s experiment

In chapter 5 in the novel Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh he writes about his experience of how he began to tag along with Ms. Bailey more often. Venkatesh says the more time he would spend with her, the more he would understand her work ethics and why she is so important to the community. Since Venkatesh was spending more time with Ms. Bailey he began to help her with food drives and food donations in the community as well as go to meetings that she would run. Venkatesh says the reason that Ms. Bailey was helping the housing projects, community and their building was because it was low on clothing and food for the winter. This portion of the novel teaches us about how many people out there have needs and the altruism in the way some

For the children of the projects, the pressure to join a gang never waivers. Quick cash and protection are hard forces to resist in a world of poverty and violence. However, the children's role in these gangs is inferior to

1.) How would you respond if a graduate student from an elite university turned up at your door and announced his intention to study you?

CH. 1- Characters 1 's Name: Sudhir Venkatesh. Sudhir is Indian, he was born lived in California. He walks into the projects and stays overnight with a gang even though he knows he doesn 't fit in.

In chapter 2 of Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day, Venkatesh spends time with a Chicago drug kingpin nick named J.T. During his time spent with this kingpin, Venkatesh explores the troubled projects of Chicago such as the Robert Taylor complex and begins to learn the inner operations of the kingpins business. He learned that J.T ran the central operations of these miniature complexes and ran his illicit business like a legitimate corporation with an established hierarchy. He also learned that these apartment complexes were often united through the community being so knit close together, with all of them being understandable towards J.T illicit operations and each other’s vices. This can be noted through the estimation that “15 percent

Like thousands of students, Sudhir entered the University of Chicago graduate school in 1989 and was despatched by his professors to do some research about American urban poor. To that point, he had had little exposure to suburban neighbourhood in Chicago. It happens that he knocked on one of the roughest areas in Chicago on his first visiting where detained and nearly killed him. Fortunately, he didn’t have any injured, and instead, he knocked up an acquaintance with the gang leader J.T. This initiated his odd friend relationship with J.T for the following decade. Through this relationship and years spent in the Robert Taylor Housing Project he produced a fascinating piece of research into the lives of struggling working class families

Panel 2 Sudhir Venkatesh’s research study Gang Leader for a Day was a study he conducted over 7 years in the Chicago projects trying to answer the question at first what it was like to be black and live poor but, evolved into what was it like to be black poor and living in a gang. He started his research after being held against his will by the gang known as the Black Kings after being misrecognized as a rival Mexican gang member as he went into the projects with a questionnaire. While being held he was only able to ask one question what was it like “to be black and poor” there response was it’s not something you can understand by asking, you have to live it. An, so he came back to begin a 7 year overt participation study of that life. I think that the way Sudhir went about his study was unethical.

Decision making is to do something, to be something, to behave a certain way and a judgment about someone or something. Meaning making is the process in which we make these decisions. Such as, what have our life experiences been; where have we come from. Throughout Sudhir Venkatesh, “Gang Leader for a Day”, he shows how different people have made decisions. People like the police, the gang members, parents with young children, Ms. Bailey, JT, and even Sudhir himself. People often told Sudhir how much he had to learn or often thought of him as naive for not realizing what was going on or how his actions had affected people.

Johnstone (1981) found that youth, primarily from communities which were less poverty-ridden were much less likely to join a gang. He states that gang behavior among suburban youth is a result of community poverty (Johnstone, 1981). For instance, neighborhoods characterized by social or economic deprivation provide ample conditions to foster a young person’s involvement in gangs. Researchers have also found that communities characterized by high poverty and residential instability tend to have higher crime rates (Gottfredson and Yiu 2011).

Opponents of these views present many arguments. They claim all gangs derive from minority communities. Also of this view, people associate many murders that are acclaimed to derive from poor communities. Moreover, they think that all people from poor communities are uneducated and therefore don’t know any better and result in a life of violence.

The book “Gang Leader for a Day” by Sudhir Venkatesh is and interesting insight into the life of a gang member, as well as people who live in the projects. When reading this book, several sociological things stood out to me, however three things really captured my mind. Those included social class differences, racial discrimination, and power conflict theory.

Offenders of a poorer class may view crime completely different than an upper class person. Robbery, drug dealing, theft, murder may all be viewed as a way of life to a lower class individual. Most gang members are lower class and they see this kind of activity as a necessary action to survive. These criminal infractions are how they feed their family, so they will not bat their eye when it comes to committing such offenses. They are merely a way of life and stigmas attached to their class system. These same crimes are committed by those of upper class but their motives are out of haste or greed opposed to necessity.