Gang Leader For a Day

Venkatesh has now spent three years researching life at Robert Taylor Homes and he starts talking to his academic advisers about his dissertation topic: what exactly will he write about? His professors are not as interested in the research on the Black Kings as he’d hoped and Prof. Wilson in particular insisted that he take a wider perspective on the role of the gang in the community. His advisers are also increasingly concerned about his safety and warn him not to get too close to any one source. This advice shocks Venkatesh and he is concerned about how to tell J.T. that he needs to take more of a community-focused approach.

Venkatesh thinks J.T. appreciates having an outsider to talk to but finds it disconcerting when he discusses his work as if he is a legitimate businessman. In fact, J.T. sees himself as a philanthropist, someone who has returned to the projects to help others. Venkatesh knows that this isn’t a complete picture of J.T’s wok and still wonders what is being hidden from him. One day, he jokingly comments that J.T.’s job is easy. J.T.’s reply is “If you think it’s so easy, you try it” (74). Caught off-guard, Venkatesh agrees and they establish some ground rules for his brief time as a gang-leader, such as not using a gun or selling drugs to anyone.

The next morning, they meet at a diner in an Irish-American neighborhood and J.T. eats breakfast while they wait for Price and T-Bone. He explains that there are some things he can’t let Venkatesh do, in case he gets in trouble with his bosses. When Price and T-Bone arrive, Venkatesh makes an attempt to talk like a gangster, which makes the others laugh and T-Bone threatens to beat him if he ever calls him “nigger” again. They start discussing the day’s agenda and it’s up to Venkatesh to provide solutions to problems such as who is going to be put on clean-up duty and finding a space where the gang can hold regular meetings. They spend the rest of the day settling disputes and monitoring the gang’s sales crews and Venkatesh realizes that J.T. is an accomplished manager.

For instance, when J.T. and Venkatesh have to confront the leader of a sales crew who is selling diluted crack cocaine in order to make more profit for himself Venkatesh expects that J.T. will kick him out of the gang, but J.T. tells him that they don’t want to lose someone so smart. Instead he stops the young man, Michael, and his crew working—and therefore earning—for a week and makes him distribute his profits among his crew.

Venkatesh’s experience as a gang leader for a day “was both more banal and more dramatic” (89) than he had anticipated. He realizes that J.T. is constantly under pressure to make sure that his faction earns enough to satisfy the gang’s senior leaders, which makes him paranoid about being ripped off. Despite his newfound respect for what J.T. does, he remains critical of him and wants to learn more about J.T.’s bosses. However, the “next set of answers about life in Robert Taylor came from the second most powerful force in [his] orbit, the woman known to one and all as Ms. Bailey”(90).