Gang Leader for a Day

This week we read an excerpt from the book Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh. Venkatesh was interested in studying the poor living in the projects of Chicago. He was just beginning to learn the procedure of interviewing someone and he set up a list of impersonal multiple choice questions he expected would be answered easily. To his surprise, he was not welcomed to the neighborhood by a gang, called the Black Kings. The part of this chapter that really surprised me was when the leader of the gang told Venkatesh he could meet him and his gang members at the same spot the following week, and that Venkatesh actually accepted his offer. Eventually, he ends up hanging out with them and learning a lot without interviewing them directly. It was really brave of him to do this for his career and it was shocking to see that he would go this far. Relating to Charon's article regarding categorizations and generalizations, Venkatesh uses his natural skill of categorizing when he hangs out with these gang members. Since he was studying to become a sociologist, he had the advantage of knowing that using negative assumptions when categorizing makes them his categorizations inaccurate. If you notice, he never judges or racially stereotypes people in the gang or people in the neighborhood. When generalizing, he makes intelligent ones. For example, even though the gang members wouldn't let him accomplish his goal when he first came into the neighborhood, he shouldn't try to harm a gang leader or gang members because he could risk getting hurt. This shows that no matter who you are, sociologist or not, people generalize others naturally. These categorizations are useful because they protect us and help us understand our surroundings. However, we should be careful to prevent these categorizations from becoming racial stereotypes or negative assumptions about a group of people.