Unavailable
Unavailable
Unavailable
Ebook350 pages5 hours
Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: “13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city,” and nearly every morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine other victims? As with war, much of our focus on inner-city violence is on the death toll, but the reality is that far more victims live to see another day and must cope with their injuries—both physical and psychological—for the rest of their lives. Renegade Dreams is their story. Walking the streets of one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods—where the local gang has been active for more than fifty years—Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably damaged, seeking to understand how they cope and how they can be better helped.
Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only know from news reports—a place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong street—Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It’s not just a warzone but a community, a place where people’s dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this, whether or not his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry—like dreams—are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.
Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only know from news reports—a place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong street—Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It’s not just a warzone but a community, a place where people’s dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this, whether or not his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry—like dreams—are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.
Unavailable
Read more from Laurence Ralph
Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related to Renegade Dreams
Related ebooks
Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sidewalk Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking a Mass Institution: Indianapolis and the American High School Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRacial Baggage: Mexican Immigrants and Race Across the Border Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFanon For Beginners Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQueer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStreetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Righteous Dopefiend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAs Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIs the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Women's Revolution: Russia 1905–1917 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHuman Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Anthropology For You
The Way of the Shaman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHomo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Survive in Ancient Egypt Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Psychology of Totalitarianism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bruce Lee Wisdom for the Way Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Regarding the Pain of Others Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of the American People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Rootworkers & Hoodoo in the Mid-South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Trails: An Exploration Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Renegade Dreams
Rating: 4.333333333333333 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
3 ratings0 reviews