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.

On Being Trampled to Death at Wal-Mart in Valley Stream

Arriving home is never easy after a long trip to another culture. With the machine gun blasts still reverberating from the Mumbai attacks when we got off the plane at JFK yesterday afternoon, we were startled to learn that Jdimytai Damour, 34, an employee at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, NY, was killed when 2,000 maniacal customers pushed through the doors on Black Friday, impatient and murderous to begin their holiday shopping before dawn.

How can this be?

We have become a nation of consumers, desperate to shop. With unemployment at an historic high, insecurity in the very bowels of American business--banking, automobile, publishing, media, even computers and software--, and foreclosures of family homes as well as rental apartments because of irresponsible lending to landlords, this identity is threatened, turning ordinary people into monsters, uncaring monsters. I grew up in the town next to Valley Stream. The area was once solidly working and middle class, nothing fancy, many first generation home owners, with their children being the first to attend college. The people who live there now are more vulnerable, perhaps having bought houses they couldn't quite afford, lured by fast and easy credit; perhaps their jobs are on the line; perhaps they see their futures and their children's futures diminishing.

Having just returned from the Czech Republic where ordinary people became monsters during the Nazi occupation, I am not surprised. We all have this potential inside us. This isn't a matter of "them" and "us." This is a matter of "we."

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Blink about how people become hardened to suffering when they are in a rush. People don't stop to help other people when they are late. Inside our brains we make an evaluation of what is more important: ourselves and our lives or that of a suffering stranger. So the desperation that filled the anxious crowd waiting to confirm their identities as consumers made each individual callous, reinforced by the crowd. That's what happens to human beings.

That's not what happens to monsters. This is what happens to human beings.