Great Performance !

“I’m a student at the University of Chicago,” Venkatesh sputtered, sticking to his survey script, “and I am administering—”

“Fuck you, nigger, what are you doing in our stairwell?”

There was an ongoing gang war in Chicago. Things had been violent lately, with shootings nearly every day. This gang, a branch of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation, was plainly on edge. They didn’t know what to make of Venkatesh. He didn’t seem to be a member of a rival gang. But maybe he was some kind of spy? He certainly wasn’t a cop. He wasn’t black, wasn’t white. He wasn’t exactly threatening—he was armed only with his clipboard—but he didn’t seem quite harmless either. Thanks to his three months trailing the Grateful Dead, he still looked, as he would later put it, “like a genuine freak, with hair down to my ass.”

The gang members started arguing over what should be done with Venkatesh. Let him go? But if he did tell the rival gang about this stairwell hangout, they’d be susceptible to a surprise attack. One jittery kid kept wagging something back and forth in his hands—in the dimming light, Venkatesh eventually realized it was a gun—and muttering, “Let me have him, let me have him.” Venkatesh was very, very scared.

The crowd grew, bigger and louder. Then an older gang member appeared. He snatched the clipboard from Venkatesh’s hands and, when he saw that it was a written questionnaire, looked puzzled.

“I can’t read any of this shit,” he said.

“That’s because you can’t read,” said one of the teenagers, and everyone laughed at the older gangster.

Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything