Living with violence teaches a person to spot danger quickly. Megan Kang’s essay asks what happens when that vigilance follows someone into an ambiguous encounter, turning a look or a passing remark into a threat. The same habits that once protected a life can help produce another confrontation.
Kang was part of a team that interviewed 99 men who had participated in READI Chicago. The programme paired paid work with group cognitive behavioural sessions and help navigating housing, legal and safety problems over 18 months. More than a third of those interviewed had been shot. Their expectations of danger had a basis in experience.
Three patterns emerged in their accounts: reading ambiguity as hostility, seeing retaliation as the only available response, and treating past violence as proof of an unchangeable self. The sessions gave men repeated opportunities to check those interpretations. A deliberate insult might have another explanation. A confrontation might allow a question or an exit. Something harmful a person had done could be understood without making it their permanent identity.
The essay opens with King, a pseudonymous participant, loading a gun after his friend’s killing. He ultimately stayed home and cried, using a reassuring phrase he had practised in the programme. His grief remained, but revenge had become a choice he could decline.
Wages, staff support and a setting where men could lower their guard helped make that practice possible. Kang’s account places the work of changing one’s mind inside those material and social conditions. Participants still had to distinguish genuine danger from a mistaken reading while living in neighbourhoods where danger continued.
The interviews describe how change felt; they cannot isolate which part of READI produced it. The programme combined several kinds of support. Kang’s argument is that learning another response takes time, safety and other people, especially when the habits being revised were learned through survival.