scared. The crowd grew, bigger and louder. Then an older gang member appeared. He snatched the clipboard from Venkateshs hands and, when he saw that it was a written questionnaire, looked puzzled. "I cant read any of this shit," he said. "Thats because you cant read," said one of the teenagers, and everyone laughed at the older gangster. He told Venkatesh to go ahead and ask him a question from the survey. Venkatesh led with the how-does-it-feel-to-be-black-and- poor question. It was met with a round of guffaws, some angrier than others. As Venkatesh would later tell his university colleagues, he real- ized that the multiple-choice answers A through E were insufficient. In reality, he now knew, the answers should have looked like this:     a. Very bad b. Bad c. Neither bad nor good d. Somewhat good e. Very good f. Fuck you   Just as things were looking their bleakest for Venkatesh, another man appeared. This was J. T., the gangs leader. J. T. wanted to know what was going on. Then he told Venkatesh to read him the survey question. He listened but then said he couldnt answer the question because he wasnt black. "Well then," Venkatesh said, "how does it feel to be African Amer- ican and poor?" "I aint no African American either, you idiot. Im a nigger." J. T. then administered a lively though not unfriendly taxonomical lesson in "nigger" versus "African American" versus "black." When he was through, there was an awkward silence. Still nobody seemed to know