Gang Leader for a Day:
A Rogue Sociologist Takes
to the Streets
Sudhir Venkatesh, Penguin
Books, 2008
1
“Chicago School” of Sociology
 Emerged in 1920s – 1930s
 Specialized in urban sociology
 Used ethnographic techniques, immersed selves
in local settings
 Focused on micro-level interaction
 Emphasized individual’s relation to immediate
social environment, small units like family,
workplace, neighborhood, local community
groups
 Saw sociology leading to social reform
2
African Americans in Chicago



“Great Migrations” from 1910-1960 brought
hundreds of thousands of blacks from the
American South to Chicago
White hostility and population growth
combined to create a black ghetto on the
“South Side” of Chicago
The “Black Belt” of Chicago was the chain of
neighborhoods on the South Side where 3/4s
of the city's African American population lived
by the mid-20th century
3
William Julius Wilson

African American Professor of Sociology at U
of Chicago (1972 -1996), then Harvard

The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and
Changing American Institutions (1978)
 argues that significance of race is waning, and an AfricanAmerican's socioeconomic class is comparatively more
important in determining his/her life chances


The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass, and Public Policy (1987)
When Work Disappears: The World of the New
Urban Poor (1996)
4
The “culture of poverty”


Tried to explain why generations of poor
people reproduce same circumstances
1965 “Report on the Negro Family: The Case
for National Action” (aka “Moynihan report,”
after Sen. Moynihan, D, NY) investigated why
African Americans were not participating in the
“affluent society” and highlighted the following
factors:


Weak family structure: "the fundamental problem is that of family
structure, that the negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling“
Rejection of values around self-reliance and work
5
“Culture of poverty” critique
 Critics charged the thesis “blames the victim”
rather than “the system” or “institutional racism”
 deeply embedded, historical racial discrimination
 Critics say problem is not “black culture” (i.e.,
values & norms) but socioeconomic structures
 prefer structuralist theories of poverty
 Today, researchers have re-conceptualized
culture and look at interaction between “culture”
& “structure” to explain persistent poverty (see
NYT, 10/17/10)
6
The crack epidemic
 Crack epidemic decimated urban neighborhoods, in
1980s, peaking early in the 1990s
 First “crack babies” born in 1984
 Most children from the new generation stayed away from
crack and never tried it themselves. Alfred Blumstein, a
criminologist from Carnegie Mellon University, claims 4
factors account for the end of the epidemic:
1) getting guns out of the hands of kids
2) shrinking of the crack markets and their institutionalization
3) robustness of the economy – “There are jobs for kids now
who might otherwise be attracted to dealing"
4) criminal justice response, or as he puts it, "incapacitation
related to the growth of incarceration"
7
Crime and mass incarceration
 1 in 31 adults in US is now in prison or jail or on probation or parole
 Correctional control rates are concentrated by gender, race &
geography:
 1 in 18 men (5.5%) vs 1 in 89 women (1.1%)
 1 in 11 black adults (9.2%); 1 in 27 Hispanic adults (3.7%);1 in 45 white
adults (2.2 %)
 Rates even higher in some neighborhoods: in one block-group of
Detroit’s East Side, for example, 1 in 7 adult men (14.3%) is under
correctional control
 Georgia, where it’s 1 in 13 adults, leads the top 5 states that also
include Idaho, Texas, Massachusetts, Ohio and the District of Columbia
(Pew Center on the States, “1 in 31,” 2008)
 Recent books by Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow, 2010) and
Douglas Blackmon (Slavery by Another Name, 2008) argue mass
incarceration of blacks is parallel to enslavement and peonage laws
8
Is Black America now “splintering”?
 In Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America




(2010), Eugene Robinson, carves modern American
blacks into 4 categories:
Transcendants: wealthy blacks, composed chiefly of
athletes, singers and media darlings
Abandoned: a "large minority" of African Americans that
sociologists used to call the “underclass” in the 1980s
Emergents: people who are biracial, children of parents
from Africa or the African diaspora, or, like Obama, both
Black mainstream: a "middle-class majority with a full
ownership stake in American society"
9