Sudhir Venkatesh, born in India, began to pursue his PhD in sociology at University of Chicago in 1989. He was studying under the eminent poverty scholar William Julius Wilson and volunteered to do field work on the causes of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.
Venkatesh was a thoughtful, handsome, well built, and a BRAVE Indian scholar, very much like many of our ECE Indian students here at Georgia Tech. He went straight to the source of the poverty of these communities, which was narcotics (specifically crack), and deliberately sought out the gangs who sold them to the communities to survey them.
“Well then,” Venkatesh, who got himself captured and held under captivity after continuously provoking gang members with sociological questions, still pounding away at them with his questions, “how does it feel to be African American and poor?”
Here we shall censor the responses that Venkatesh got in return. But we wanted to share the braveness, persistence, and patience of this scholar who risked his life to allow the academia to demystify the true financial compensation (aside from the Hollywood hype) of illegal-drug businesses in America.
So how does the drug business work? An awful lot like a Mcdonald restaurant actually, with its corporate-style book keeping: 1 CEO, 20 Board of Directors, 120 officers, 5,300 foot soldiers, and 20,000 unpaid rank-and-file members. Here’s a pay sheet:
CEO – $100,000
20 Board members – $500,000
120 Officers (each command 50 foot soldiers) – $7/hr
5,300 foot soldiers – $3.30/hr
20,000 unpaid rank-and-file members – negative salary, they must pay gang dues
(many of whom wanted nothing more than an opportunity to become a foot soldier).
Now what is the typical fate you would have faced being part of this drug gang?
Number of times arrested – 5.9
Number of nonfatal wounds or injuries – 2.4
Chances of being killed – 1 in 4
A 1-in-4 chance of being killed! That makes crack dealing the most dangerous job in America. On top of that, crack dealers spread violence wherever he goes and destroy solidarity and financial stability of entire communities. And if the salary is only $3.30 an hour for an average Joe-Shmoe (McDonald pays 2 or 3 times higher), a clear headed scholar such as one of you would ask, why would anyone get involved with this dirty business?
Eta Kappa Nu (a national scholarship program) believes that it is ignorance that is feeding African Americans into this epidemic business that has been plaguing this city that we live in for decades (as well as this country that we live in). Thus in the past 4 years, we decided to work especially against the school dropping out rates troubling Atlanta and Georgia in general amongst the African American demographics. Our working thesis is that if people, especially kids who are still in their formative years and not addicted to drugs, can stay in school long enough to understand that the payoff matrix of being a functional and contributing member of society versus that of a deviant and destructive drug dealer (in doing so who will most likely also have to live with his mother on $3.30/hr salary and have an 1-in-4 chance of somebody else “busting a cap in his head” to steal his job), he will have more incentive to stay upright and continue onto a higher education.
In pursuit of this goal, Eta Kappa Nu has team up with Hope Worldwide charity program for the past 4 years, the number one ranking tutoring program here in Georgia for the last decade now (and internationally, a $40 billion dollar a year charity foundation). With this joint venture, we hope to insert our scholastic influence with an age group whom are still defining their life’s identities, values, and attitudes in the most non-academic, impoverished, and drug-afflicted areas of our community, such as the inner-city Atlanta.
We believe that our effort to educate these children with basic skills of arithmetic, reading, and character, which we do together every weekend, will help these children get the message quite early that the narcotic business is not worth it. It’s just simple math. And plus you’re destroying your community, your family, friends, and neighborhood wherever you go.
So far this is the one of most successful projects Eta Kappa Nu operates. We run a poll surveying our participating Eta Kappa Nu members on their experience with this service project. Up to now, we have a near 80% satisfying response with our Eta Kappa Nu participants. And the kids absolutely love our Eta Kappa Nu students. These kids know our members by their names and look forward to spending Saturday mornings with our students.
Sudhir Venkatesh was a brave scholar who ventured into danger to obtain data to help the society to better understand the complex issue of poverty and drug-abuse and how it ties to the lack-of-education, in hope of making our community that we share a better place. Eta Kappa Nu, not so brave of-course, hopes to use his knowledge to help our own community here, such as the inner-city, Atlanta, to become a better place for our future generation. We hope that everyone can share our bright vision.