Racial Outliers

After reading the excerpt in class of Malcolm Gladwell's: Outlier's-The Story of Success, I was so intrigued by his asterisk to America's dominant narrative of success that I decided read the book in its entirety. Along with his 10,000 hour rule and theory that arbitrary advantage and luck play as large of a role-if not larger-than innate talent in the equation of true success, Gladwell brings up many other fascinating points. However it is not until the end of the book that he truly brings his theories full circle.

In the book’s last chapter, readers gain an insight into Gladwell's family history and discover that the success of his relatives were not just of their own making, but depended on opportunity and legacy, on history and community. He ties the lives of his family as a foundational warrant to prove his final claim. However, what stood out to me the most out of this last chapter was not the remarkable power of opportunity and luck in the story of sucess, but something that connects back to our unit on agency and oppression.

Gladwell’s relatives lived on the island of Jamaica. In Jamaica, the plantation owners extracted the maximum possible effort from their human property while the property was still young. They worked the slaves until they were useless or dead, and then simply bought another round of slaves at the market. They had no problem with the philosophical contradiction of cherishing the children they had with a female slave, while simultaneously treating their slaves as property. Thus due to the inhumane treatment of dark skinned slaves, the lighter-skin classes-or brown skinned- blacks in Jamaica came to be regarded as worthier, for they were partly of white blood. Very stark divisions divided the dark skinned from the brown skinned. These divisions were most apparent within the family structure, which ultimately lay the foundation for the public manifestation of color prejudice: “the most lightly colored will be favored at the expense of the others…the darker members of the family will be kept out of the way when the friends of the fair or fairer members of the family are being entertained” (Gladwell 282).

In our agency and oppression unit, we talked in depth about the oppression of whites onto blacks and the agency between blacks. However, we did not talk about the existence of oppression within a single racial group. Rather than uniting and creating agency to empower their racial status, the blacks created further division within their own race by essentially segregating the darker skinned from the light skinned. Not only did this most likely delay their attainment of equal rights, but it also reflects an approval, rather than a defiance, for what the whites were doing. It sends the message that superficial divisions based on skin color are acceptable. Perhaps this is a commentary of what one will do to rise up the social ladder. Regardless of familial ties, friends, and the belief that “all men are created equal,” it appears that people will do whatever necessary to gain, or remain in power.