Underground authority: a gonzo sociologist discovers how drug gangs give ghetto life a fragile kind of order.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin
• Position: Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets - Book review

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

By Sudhir Venkatesh

Penguin Press, 320 pp.

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It has been something of a surprise, given that the problems of the American inner city have become a less urgent public obsession in recent years, to discover an emerging renaissance in the field of ghetto sociology. In popular culture, the pioneer in this arena has been David Simon, the creator of the HBO series The Wire, who has treated his subjects with a rare degree of intimacy and sophistication. In academia, the crucial figure has been the Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, whose immersion studies of the underground economy have done as much as any investigator to discover how the mechanisms of the ghetto really work.

Venkatesh has just written a new memoir of his research, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. In 1989, Venkatesh was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago, a suburban kid from California with deadhead hair, professor parents, and a generally benign, hippie-inflected take on things. At Chicago, he ended up in the orbit of William Julius Wilson, the famed black scholar of the ghetto. Wilson was contemplating a project that would, initially through a set of questionnaires given to young black youth, aim to distinguish what effect the ghetto had in limiting opportunity, beyond the normal impairments that come with poverty in the United States. In what ways, that is, was the experience of the ghetto unique?

In an episode that sounds suspiciously like grad student hazing, Venkatesh was dispatched to ask survey questions of young black men living in a Chicago housing project, the Robert Taylor Homes. He asks, for instance, "How does it feel to be black and poor? Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good?" He gets laughed at. "Fuck you, you got to be fucking kidding me," one kid tells him. He is briefly suspected of being a Mexican gang member, and then merely mocked vigorously. But eventually he is taken under the wing of a drug dealer, whom Venkatesh calls J.T.

The dealer runs an area of the housing project for a citywide gang called the Black Kings, and over the course of five years he gives Venkatesh full access to his operation. J.T. permits the sociologist a close and privileged view of ghetto life that few other academics have ever managed. It is an astonishing bit of luck. Venkatesh starts to hang out at the Taylor Homes every day, and his intimate access to the gang leader becomes the source of his research--and, ultimately, his fame. (Venkatesh and J.T. were both featured in the 2005 best seller Freakonomics, and in 2006 Venkatesh...