The Outliers and ReFraming Discussions About Race

Using my new Kindle, I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers, his third book on culture. Gladwell is a writer for The New Yorker magazine, and the author of two books that created quite a stir: The Tipping Point which explained how ideas and fads are spread and Blink which explored how we think. Many of the ideas that are developed in his books began as articles for The New Yorker. An archive of Gladwell's work is available at his website. Now The Outliers is further embedding Gladwell into our examination of American culture, especially in the Obama Age, and especially about race.

A little diversion: This weekend I attended a social justice retreat in New Hampshire with a whole bunch of committed young and not-so-young law school students. Be encouraged: we have a new generation of energetic, creative, and committed men and women who want to change the world: environmental justice; government accountability; public interest law that empowers the poor, immigrants, and the disenfranchised; resurrecting public education; juvenile and criminal justice; domestic violence; and equality for everyone, no matter their gender identity and race.

It was invigorating, hopeful, and many of the students came to the retreat because they truly care. Most did not have an intellectual framework for their desire to do good. After the fall of the ideological right with the Bush administration failures, are we at the end of ideology?

Malcolm Gladwell in The Outliers also has no ideology. He is not a scholar. He is not a professor and does not claim to be the primary source of his theories. Some criticism of The Outliers focuses on his looseness with logic and selectivity of his examples.

Yet Gladwell has that ability to take academic information and translate it so that the jargon slips away and the ideas are exposed and accessible.

Others critique his shotgun method of making his point and maybe a little envious that he is commanding $40,000 for a speaking engagement.

However, this is what The Outliers does and does well: it creates a way to dispel the myths of genius and meritocracy, exposing the hidden elements, and often the hidden privileges, that helped create a Bill Gates, Bill Joy, or a Joe Flom, or defeated a Chris Langren. Even skeptics agree that the book is provocative.

I see The Outliers as a way of having courageous conversations about race.

We need to admit the hidden and not so hidden aspects of what helps an individual become successful in this society. Race has something to do with it not because of inherent qualities, but because of cultural legacy and access to opportunities. Because of birth, some people get to discover passions and then have opportunities to develop those passions. Unless we have the courage to examine how our society works to the advantage and detriment to individuals, we will lose our ability to build the structures and encourage the communities needed to support accomplishment and creativity that is not predetermined by race, ethnicity, and class.