I am
reading Sudhir Venkatesh’s 2008 book, Gang
Leader for a Day. Venkatesh spent ten years embedded with a gang leader in
Chicago’s infamous Robert Taylor Homes, a group of high-rise buildings that
became a self-encapsulated universe of urban black poor.
Venkatesh is a sociologist. He began his fieldwork in 1989 as a young
sociologist studying at the University of Chicago. His work is giving me the
clues I need to help me understand how the separation of black poor people from
larger society gets perpetuated for decades upon decades, despite progress in
societal laws that result in increased opportunities for everyone. Venkatesh
shows how an area that was ostensibly built to provide temporary affordable
housing for lower-income people became a means of keeping those people persistently
separated from middle- to upper-income society.
What
Venkatesh reveals is the set of clues I have been looking for: the reasons that
segments of people get diagnosed as groups to pity and to be frustrated with,
rather than being viewed as individuals who are one with society but need a
time-limited financial boost.
One
aspect of the population in the Robert Taylor Homes that glares out at me is
the inward psychological inability to change a bad situation. Venkatesh
describes an ingrown societal system operating in the Robert Taylor Homes,
within which people accept mistreatment from each other rather than leaving for
a better existence. A man named C.T. is described as receiving a brutal beating
from J.T., the gang leader who controls the self-enclosed economy of the Robert
Taylor buildings. C.T. has skills as an auto mechanic. As an outsider looking
in via Venkatesh’s description, I see a in C.T. man with personal capacities
that could gain him a job and a better
life outside the projects. However, albeit with umbrage, he accepts the
beating and continues to live in the filthy tenement building, subjecting
himself to the control of the Black Kings gang.
The Robert
Taylor tenements were full of people who engaged in prostitution, drug selling,
and stealing – dead-end pursuits – and yet these people seemed to believe two
things: (1) they had no other choice, and (2) they could make such a way of
life work. They beat each other up, they committed fruitless vengeance against
each other, and they produced children together; the children were too often
doomed to grow up exactly like their parents, as hopeless and as miserable. The
gang leaders demanded that their teenaged recruits stay in high school and even
get a college degree, not with a goal of getting them out of the gang, but to
increase the gang’s strength as a business enterprise. These promising young
people thereby entered into a way of life where they would have permission to
do violence to others, and where they would accept violence from others.
More
than once, Venkatesh describes long-term tenement inhabitants mentioning the
existence of middle-class people who grew up in the projects, left, and did not
return. Significance: There is a way
out. There was a way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and there is a way
now. People do not have to stay in
the projects throughout their lives. Venkatesh observes very honestly that the
desire for power and control motivated many of these long-term inhabitants to
remain where they were, simultaneously doing good and doing harm, doing as much
to snare other inhabitants within the tenements as to provide them food,
clothing, and medical care.
What do we have to give up when we decide to change?
Identity, power, status – albeit status that depends on the approval of people
whose approval is not worthwhile?
I look
forward to reading more of Venkatesh’s work.
|