num_pages: 256
description: Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre 13 shot 4 dead overnight across the city and nearly every morning the same elision 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 injuriesboth physical and psychologicalfor the rest of their lives. Renegade Dreams is their story. Walking the streets of one of Chicagos most violent neighborhoodswhere the local gang has been active for more than fifty yearsLaurence 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 reportsa place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong streetRalph 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. Its not just a warzone but a community a place where peoples 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 carrylike dreamsare 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.
language: English
title: Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago
publisher: University of Chicago Press