Case Study: The Hustler And The Hustled

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Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago who wanted to assist a professor in a study about young blacks and how their environmental factors influenced their outcomes. To do this he intended to pass out a survey to young blacks in poor neighborhoods, particularly Robert Taylor. However, on his first day, he is confronted by members of the Black Kings who did not allow him to enter the building. Their leader, J.T., laughed at him after reading the survey Sudhir was using and explained that he would not learn anything about their way of life with a survey. Thus, Sudhir decides to perform an ethnographic study which involves him following around J.T. to observe how life in the projects works. In doing this, …show more content…

In chapter six: “The Hustler and the Hustled”, it discusses Sudhir’s endeavor in interviewing the community members on how they make a living. He found that many people perform various illegal activities to get by. These vary from innocent jobs like selling candies and illegally running a babysitting business in an apartment to more serious illegal jobs like prostitution and violence. The book calls this hustling. Hustling may be considered deviant in any other community, but in the Robert Taylor community, this is a normal way of survival. The Black Kings’ involvement in this is the regulation of everyone’s hustling business, whether it be beneficial or not to the hustlers. The Black Kings are considered positively deviant by many people who take advantage of them. They exploit the Black Kings’ want to not be arrested and want to do business in the area for their money. Such people use the money to help the community. For example, Autry, a club director at the Boys and Girls club, is one of those people who believe the Black Kings’ activities are beneficial to the community. One of the activities that he coordinates to lower teen violence is a midnight basketball league and each gang in the area has to pay a five thousand dollar buy-in and put together four teams of ten players (Venkatesh 100). Being an outsider to this community, Sudhir is puzzled by the concept of using gang money to fund a community activity, but that was the norm in the

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