Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader For A Day

In today’s society many individuals take on different routes while trying to conduct a specific research project in order to receive accuracy data. Doing research is not always easy; in fact it may come with some odd beginnings and different challenges. In the novel Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, Venkatesh is a college student studying sociology at the University of Chicago. He goes on an uncommon route by entering an environment surrounded with gang members and black people living in poverty. He is interested on how minorities, specifically black people live their life on a daily day basis, “I’m a student at the university, doing a survey and I’m looking for some families” (Venkatesh 12).

The novel starts off with …show more content…
Throughout his whole study, Venkatesh is very aware that there is a lot of illegal stuff happening in this community and how everyone, including himself is considered a “hustler”, “Of course you’re learning! But you are also hustling. And we are all hustlers. So when we see another one of us, we gravitate toward them. Because we need other hustlers to survive” (Venkatesh 188). He is considered to be a hustler because he is doing anything he can do in order to receive all the information that he may need to fulfill his study. Members in these projects can’t even depend on police or even ambulance to help them in the time of need, “Call the ambulance…. They won’t come” (Venkatesh 223). This statement is very disturbing, how can you live in a neighborhood and can’t even count on the people who get paid to help you, to actually help …show more content…
In this type of environment, the children from the community look up to the drug dealers for help and guidance; everyone helps out each other is Robert Taylor and makes sure everyone is safe, “We live in a community…. Everyone in this building helps as much as they can. We share our food….But when you’re here; you’re in my home and my community. And we’ll take care of you” (Venketesh 43). At this point, I would assume that Venketesh wouldn’t view everyone as bad people, but instead just individuals trying to survive in a different type of way. In our society, everyone is for themselves and everyone is separated into different groups. So, I find it interesting how in such a dangerous and poor community everyone can be so close, maybe because they all are on the same level and no one is higher than another person? They all fight the same fight and share the same story, which is probably why they are all so well connected, of course with their ups and