Preview

Gang Leader For A Day Summary

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
377 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Gang Leader For A Day Summary
II.
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is an Indian American sociologist, he was born in India in 1966.
Venkatesha received a B.A in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 1988.
At the University of Chicago he studied under Professor William Julius Wilson, in which he focused on a housing project with Robert Taylor Homes. He wrote a book published in 2008 and it was titled “ Gang Leader For A Day “. This book studied the life of the characteristics of
Chicago, particularly the Robert Taylor Homes and the gangs. Venkatesh wanted to wrote this book to tell people about the time he was living in. He wanted to explain the inside world of the gang , drug dealing, and inside the world of a poor community to help people understand

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Best Essays

    In Gang Leader for a Day, the author Sudhir Venkatesh has introduced himself to the culture of the Robert Taylor Homes of Chicago. In this experience Venkatesh meets his primary informant J.T. who shows Sudhir how the community operates. Sudhir is an ethnographer who is conducting qualitative research on the community that makes up the Robert Taylor Homes. J.T. is one of the many primary leaders for the Black Kings who has taken in Sudhir knowing his purpose for hanging around a treacherous community as an outsider. Venkatesh has spent several years in conducting research of the community and interviews of the residents.…

    • 3749 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    As J.T. told Sudhir, “A drug economy was useful for the community, since it redistributed the drug addicts’ money back into the community via the gang’s philanthropy.” Because of J.T. being the leader of a gang, he is like a leader of a company. For example, J.T. often talked about how difficult it was to oversee the gang, to keep the drug economy running smoothly, and to deal with law-abiding citizens who saw him as an advisory. This compares to the leader of a company because they would also have to oversee their workers, make sure operations are running smoothly, and deal with people who don’t always agree with what the company is doing. J.T. is also similar to the leader of a company because they have to motivate their workers. For instance, J.T. always talked to his men about having pride in their work and had to motivate the younger dealers to brave the cold and sell as much crack as they could.…

    • 1698 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Gang Leader for a Day

    • 1772 Words
    • 8 Pages

    In the text the author, Sudhir Venkatesh, observes how elites use their power to control the less powerful. This is evident in the Robert Taylor Homes, where the Black Kings profit from drug sales that control the community, while the rest of the families are struggling to survive. There even appear to be hierarchies within a hierarchy. For example, within the Black Kings gang there were leaders such as a man known as “J.T.”, who would make thousands in profits from commanding others and then there were young teenage men who actually sold the drugs and barely earned minimum wage (256). Aside from the drug sale employees, other workers such as those who ran shops or did menial work from their high rises were also controlled by the gangs, who would use fear tactics to implement various taxes upon them. Clearly the majority of the society is being controlled by the middle and upper-class from surrounding neighborhoods and also the gangs in the lower-class community, creating social inequality. However, conflict and change do appear by the end of the book when the Chicago Housing Authority along with President Clinton decides to demolish Robert Taylor Homes in hopes of eliminating the hierarchy of…

    • 1772 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gang Leader for a Day

    • 2298 Words
    • 10 Pages

    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 is the community aspect of the gang life. Although it was hard for Venkatesh to understand during his adventure, even the gang had a sense of what it was like to help out their community and how important it was. There were a lot of aspects of the book that showed the sociological perspective of the Robert Taylor community. The book Gang Leader for a Day shows the sociological perspective by bringing Robert Merton’s structural strain theory to life.…

    • 2298 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Gangs Research Paper

    • 1411 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Sheley, Joseph, (1995). Gang Organization, Gang Criminal Activity, and Individual Gang Members ' Criminal Behavior. . Social Science Quarterly. 76 (1), pp.53-68…

    • 1411 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Gang Prevention Program that I decided to write on is the A.R.I.S.E program, which was founded in 1986 in Miami Florida by Ed Benson. It’s a non-profit organization that provides assortment of time tested, evidence based life skills curricula for at risk youth. In this essay, I am going to focus on the programs history, mission statement, goals, success, and an overall summary of the program.…

    • 1372 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gangs run the streets in South Central Los Angeles. They are respected, dangerous, and feared by all who are not involved in gang activity. Two major Los Angeles gangs are the “Bloodz” and the “Crips”. These two gangs are professionals at what they do such as murder, drug trafficking, and avoiding law enforcement. Protecting their territory and fellow gang members resulted in one hundred twenty eight homicides in South Central Los Angeles (Tamara). Gangs run all across the country and one million people estimated are involved with gangs and gang activity. The Bloodz and Crips are the west side’s major gangs and they have a huge impact on South Central Los Angeles. Killings everyday and more members initiated every day, it’s said that gangs will never end.…

    • 1214 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sometimes I believe that we as people, specifically college students, forget how lucky we actually are. My eyes were opened up to this upon reading Sudhir Venkatesh’s remarkable story entitled Gang Leader for a Day. Through this novel, which I really enjoyed, I found myself going through an array of emotions. If I could pick one word to best describe the novel it would be a rollercoaster. At points I would laugh hysterically, while at other times I felt sorry for people, constantly my feelings going up and down. Personally I believe that Sudhir did an excellent job with his book along with the research that he conducted. Sudhir was able to grasp me and almost made me feel like I was in his shoes, as part of the gang. Just as Sudhir states…

    • 1765 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gang Leader

    • 1191 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Social imagination, “individual problems are to social problems, what is happening outside of one’s personal control. This relationship between individual experiences and public issues is the sociological imagination” (Our Social World Pg9). The book that we read “Gang Leader for a Day” by Sudhir Vankatesh clearly illustrates the sociological imagination. In the early part of the book we see Vankatesh trying to give surveys to a gang to try to understand how they feel about their lives in poverty. The rest of society sees Gang Members as a problem because of the drug trafficking and other illegal activities. When Vankatesh continues to interact with the gang we start to see things from the outside looking in. These…

    • 1191 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Crips History

    • 1708 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Before the 1980’s, the Crips and the Bloods had little involvement in narcotics trafficking. “Nonetheless, by 1983, African-American Los Angeles gangs took advantage of drug market after the easy accessibility of narcotics, especially crack, as a way of earnings”. Several of the gang affaires who became engaged in the purchasing and selling of drugs originated from the inner city areas where unemployment and poverty are a way of life.…

    • 1708 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The book is divided into two parts, before and after. The event that splits the book up is to much of a give-away for me to say unfortunately. The before part is mostly about the gang hanging out, they smoke, drink and do pranks while the after part of the book is much more about somethings else, but I can’t give away that either.…

    • 568 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poverty that comes from inability to obtain a job or being forced to work at a low paying job because of racial discrimination can lead a young person to join a gang. In her…

    • 397 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Essay On Gang Violence

    • 1249 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Street gangs are an amalgam of racism, or urban underclass poverty, of minority youth culture, of fatalism in the face of rampant deprivation, or political insensitivity, and the gross ignorance of inner-city (and inner-town) America on the part of most of us who don’t have to survive there.…

    • 1249 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gang Leader for a Day

    • 276 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrance into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.…

    • 276 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Achievements: Considered the Father of the Indian space program; instrumental in establishing the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad in November 1947; was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He along with other Ahmedabad-based industrialists played a major role in the creation of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.…

    • 651 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays