Jamil Jivani: Author of "Why Young Men"

52m read

·Nov 7, 2024

You One today I have the good fortune to be speaking with Jamil. Jivani Jamil is a Torontonian. He's an author, lawyer, activist, and host of The Road Home podcast, which was launched just recently, December 2018. He recently completed the seven-province book tour visiting thousands of young men across Canada in partnership with the Michael “Pinball” Clemons Foundation. He's 31 years old, grew up in the Toronto area, raised by a single mother. Considered illiterate in high school, at age 16, he had the highest grades at Humber College by the age of 18. Scholarship to Yale Law School by 22, he was a lawyer by the age of 25. He's taught at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, worked with JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, to start a non-profit in Ohio, a corporate lawyer at Torys LLP, and leader of police reform and voter education initiatives. He had a book published by HarperCollins last spring in Canada. The book was "Why Young Men Rage: Race and the Crisis of Identity." U.S. international publication by St. Martin's Press in May 2019. He's also, unfortunately, been diagnosed with cancer, battling stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, being on chemotherapy drugs and undergoing radiation therapy since February. So we have a lot of things to talk about, Jamil and I, so we're going to start. We're going to start conversing as a consequence. So thanks a lot for making the time to talk with me.

Thank you for the invitation.

So, why don't we start with your book and your tour?

Yeah, well, it's the book came out actually just a month after I was diagnosed with cancer. So the, it's, it's, it's been a lot of highs and lows like that. The highs have been incredible because I've had the privilege of, you know, like you, being able to go around and speak to people about my book and my ideas. Certainly, not as large audiences as you have, but I've been able to go to places in the country that I think young men need to hear stories of self-empowerment and what individual agency can accomplish. I shared that experience in areas where I think, you know, books are often not seen as relevant to the lives of everyday people. I think I've been able to learn a lot about the disconnect between the literary industry and everyday Canadians. I think that's true in other countries as well, where books sometimes aren't written for an audience of people who might most benefit from those ideas. I feel very privileged today and will continue to go around and talk to people about the struggles young men face, the tools that are often given to them in terms of how to overcome those struggles, and also the tools they find in the absence of better options.

Do you have a copy of your book just behind you? You should maybe hold it up so that we could all see it.

Yeah, yeah, let's take a look.

Yeah, so here's the book. The U.S. edition will have a similar cover and yeah, it's been a heck of an experience. You know, I think there's something very humbling about people caring what you think about anything, quite honestly. So there’s a responsibility that comes with taking the opportunity of an audience and doing something meaningful with it, and I've tried my best to do that with the book, and I'm excited to do that in other countries next year as well.

You said something interesting about books, and it's something worth delving into a bit. You know, the number of people, the proportion of people who buy books is relatively small. It's not like books are everybody's friend. So the act of a literate audience is actually a rather small minority of people. One of the things that's quite cool about YouTube, let's say, and also about podcasts, is that it enables people who might be intimidated by books but who are perfectly capable of understanding relatively complex ideas to access them another way. And it is really too bad that reading is a minority taste because, well, it's such an effective means of communication. But at least these other channels have been opening up.

I agree. And I think perhaps most effectively, books are a conversation starter. You know, the idea of putting ideas out there and then being able to go to a city you've never been before, and people have a starting point in which they can engage you and talk about their lives and your life and what's similar and what's different. That's maybe the most powerful part of a book to me. I actually think a lot about it in the sense of, you know, the most read book, for example, like the Bible and texts like that, which I think their greatest power is in trying to offer some sort of shared kind of moral universe for people of different backgrounds and ancestors and in different parts of the world to kind of come under, right? And I feel like with a book, you have that ability, I hope, which is to tell a story where you have no real say or power in who picks it up, but you hope that it's powerful enough and truthful enough that whoever picks it up is going to feel like they're part of that conversation.

So maybe you could outline for us the main points of your book and also talk about how it grew out of your experience. Being part of what's really quite remarkable about your biography is the apparent disjuncture between your status hypothetically as illiterate at age 16 and then a very high academic achiever by the age of 18. So I'm curious about the interplay. I'm curious about that period, about how that happened and what it meant, but then also about the journey that you took, so to speak, on the road to writing this book.

Yeah, when I was 16, I would maybe describe myself as someone who was at the depths of despair, right? I was a really angry person. My father had left my family. My mom was raising me and two younger sisters by herself. I was in a neighborhood where I saw what I regarded as a lot of unfairness. You know, things like racial profiling by police officers, disproportionate poverty, a lack of job opportunities. This is in the suburbs of Brampton where most of the people in my neighborhood were newcomers to the country or children of newcomers. I was kind of, I think, being weighed down by a perspective that encouraged hopelessness and victimization in my life. So I was a cognitively capable young man; that's how you go from, you know, illiterate to a Yale Law student in less than six years. But what was missing was the desire to show those good parts of me to anyone.

So what do you think it was exactly that produced that sense of despair that possessed you when you were 16? I mean, you outlined some of it, you know, you lived in a neighborhood that was, well, an immigrant neighborhood and you saw what you regarded as manifest social unfairness. But then it's obviously the case too that for some reason when you decided to, I don't know if you dropped that idea or transcended it, you did something different and all of a sudden your life took off in a variety of extremely positive directions. Like, how do you account for that initial possession by that set of ideas, and then more importantly, how do you account for the fact that you somehow managed to, let's say, escape it?

Hmm. So for my situation, I think this describes not only my situation but also my peer group as well: not having a father around and the kind of dysfunction that that often comes with put us in a position where we were looking at a lot of the wrong places for cultural leadership and pop culture, right? Hip hop, gangster movies, things like that filled the void in our case. So the tools I was given to understand my life, to explain my frustrations were tools that encouraged me to, I think, live with a certain kind of victim identity as my default, right? That I could, for example, believe that being a gangster and a criminal was acceptable for me and my peers because we experienced unfairness, right? The way the world treated us determined the kind of morals that we picked up, right? So it's justifiable revenge in some sense against an entire system, right? Or at minimum, it winds up becoming just, you lower the expectations of yourself, right? You walk around thinking that what you know to be good is something that you don't have to achieve. You don't have to strive for goodness because the world has put you in this unfair position, and therefore anything is possible.

So we think, "Okay."

So how much of that, I'm curious about that? I mean, it's a common human attitude to adopt that sort of perspective, and you know plenty of people have reason to be doubtful about the appropriateness or fairness of their life in their situation. But that, you know, there's two things there that get tangled together I think, and one is a sense of thwarted justice, right? And that might be the optimistic viewpoint that people look out in the world and they see that it's unfair, and that bothers them morally, and there's nothing wrong with being bothered that way. But the problem too is that adopting that victimization stance, and worse maybe adopting a stance that justifies a certain amount of antisocial or criminal attitude towards society given its unfairness, also provides young people, that's a young man in this case, with an excuse not to do their best and not to put effort into anything. And I think that that excuse is often masked by a self-justification that's associated with that hypothetical, stressed striving for justice. You know, because it's one thing to be upset about social injustice, but it's another thing to use that as an excuse not to strive forward.

Right, because there's a psychological element and a sociological element there that are at play. So tell me what you think about that then. Tell me how you progressed despite having that attitude, accepting that attitude, or having it inculcated.

Yeah, I think you're exactly spot-on. You know, like later on in my life, when I was a university student, for example, I would hear all of the same arguments over again, but you hear them differently when you have the privilege and opportunity of being at a university, right? When you hear about how rigged the world is and that history is burdened you, and opportunity is fleeting because of what you look like or what your parents come from. In a university environment, people take those as, you know, they pat themselves on the back for making those assertions because they think they're virtuously looking at the problems of the world that we often overlook or take for granted.

But when you're in the thick of it, when those problems are your life, when you have a choice to make every day, do I tell myself it's worth doing my homework and going to school, or do I just stay home and smoke weed in the basement? Do I make the effort to see how the little bit of agency I might have in a difficult circumstance could make the difference in where my life turns out? That's when those talking points become a potential, you know, kind of poisonous moral environment for you to live in because my friend JD writes about Hillbilly Elegy in the context of poverty in Appalachia, a concept called learned helplessness, right? And I think that's a lot of it, which is you disassociate your actions and behaviors with the outcome of what you experience in life, and when you get to that point, it's really hard to find the motivation to work hard or believe that there's a meritocracy at all in the world around you.

Alright, but the funny thing is about learned helplessness, you know, and this is something that I think is really reasonable for us to delve into, is that in the animal experimental world, which is where the concept of learned helplessness emerges, what happens to produce learned helplessness? What you do is you punish an animal for any sort of active behavior, no matter what it does. It's hopeless, and it truly is hopeless, right? Because the animal keeps trying, but every time it tries to do whatever it's going to do, it ends up being punished. So sooner or later it will just cease to act. And that has been put forward at least in part as a model for depression, and I think there's a certain amount of validity to that. Although depression is a very complex concept, the situation you're describing is somewhat different because what you pointed out was that when you were sitting at home as an adolescent, let's say, and you had the choice between doing your homework and putting forward your motive agency, however forceful that might have been, and justifying doing something like slinking off to smoke dope and avoiding your responsibilities, you could justify the avoidance by making reference to the fundamental unfairness of society. But that isn't the same as actually having tried really hard a dozen times or a hundred times and failed each time. It's like it's more like the premature presumption of learned helplessness. And I do see this very frequently among young men is that they they've adopted this attitude that the world is such a catastrophically unfair place and life is so unjust in its fundamental essence that there's no sense even trying to begin with, that you're only a fool if you do that.

Yeah, I agree. I think what happens is you see other people's failings or other young men, whether they're your peers or people you even just listen to in the music or you see on television or whatever the case, you see their attempts and failures as evidence of your own, right? And so if everybody has struggled, for example, to go to college or university, then that is in some way you trying, right? You don't see a distinction between your own efforts and those of other people. That's how I would describe my mentality at the time, which is, for instance, I could, you know, turn on the news and see a story about, let's say when I was really young, kids seeing Rodney King got beat up by police officers in Los Angeles, right? And that could stick with me and become an example of what someone like me would have gone through but for not being there at the time, right? And so you see that empal and you internalize that as an instance of, well, people like me when we walk around the street we get treated that way by cops. So I might as well have gone through that too because I see that as an example of me potentially exerting, you know, asserting myself in society and then paying a deep price for it, right? So it should emulate those, right?

So that's done. That's the price paid for adopting a certain dimension of identity. And I mean, I think it's inevitable to do that to some degree because we do belong to different group identities. But you're saying that you classified yourself, let's say, or you saw yourself in the same group as someone like Rodney King. You saw that the group that he was attributed to, you believed that that was a valid group attribution and then drew conclusions that weren't favorable to your own striving. But that also still sets you up so that you're not really testing yourself against the world, right? You're starting out with these assumptions about the privacy of group identity, let's say. Now I'm curious about that too because you also talked about the negative consequences of fatherlessness. And one of the, so I’m inferring from that that you see a link between the presence of a father and an antidote to that socialization by, what, by popular culture? Group identity? Something like that? I mean, we know that fatherlessness isn't good for people by any measure. It's a catastrophe.

Yeah, well I think like if you're in that frame of mind where those instances of group identity starts to tell you something about yourself, then having a man in your house who's not getting beat up by the cops is automatically what a complication, right? Having a man in your house who looks after his kids and goes to work and takes responsibility for his family in this community, who shows you how to love a woman and be kind to people, that is a complication of an other worldview that might otherwise think that every other man who's not your dad has something to teach you about who you are.

Yeah, okay, so that's identity-centered a lot in that. So the idea is something like, if, and I believe this, like is one of the things I've noticed about kids who are, let's say neurologically intact, so maybe there's lots of reasons why people can develop psychological disorders and some of them are physical, but imagine that you take a child who's physically healthy and you put them in a given environment. My intuition has been that a child needs to have at least one positive role model within imitation distance. Now sometimes he or she can sort of piece that together fragmentarily also from popular media images, you know, the images of the heroes in movies and so on. But it's really helpful to have at least one person in your immediate environment who is manifesting the pattern that characterizes individual success. And so maybe it's something like if that positive role model isn't there, then the easiest default is to a victimized group identity. Does that seem reasonable?

I think it's reasonable, especially if you're from a community and you share an identity that has been very strongly associated with victimization in the first place. And I think that's a big part of it is, you know, when I was a kid and thought of myself as a black man, that immediately came with a certain kind of baggage of historical and present-day victimization. And because my father is black and my mother is white, him being gone and in some ways being my connection to the black family being gone, I was very vulnerable to how blackness was being presented to me because I didn't have a black person in the house showing me something different. And the blackness that I was presented was one that was deeply tied to victimization, right? And one that was constantly excusing any poor behavior we might have—maybe not more than any other group of people—but associating any poor behavior we might have with history, right? And so it's this idea that you are inheriting low expectations of yourself and of your behavior, and you don't know what it would look like to look in the mirror and not see a victim, right?

Would that even be right? It also provides that avenue for justification that we already described. And so, okay, so let's look at this two ways. Well, there's an old psychoanalytic idea, you know, of secondary gains and so if we're going to be critical in our analysis about victimization culture, we might ask, well, what benefits does it bring to the people who adopt it? So, and you know, those can—and when I mean benefits, I don't mean long-term iterative high-quality benefits, I mean short-term payoffs, let's say. You know how it is if you have work to do and you avoid it—that's a short-term payoff, it's a benefit—and because you don't have to do the work now. There's a medium to long-term cost, but I'm very curious about the element of victimization culture that justifies, I think, antisocial and avoidant behavior is probably the right way of putting it. Now, you know, where I grew up, I grew up in a working-class community and I had friends and associates who were—who ranged from, you know, pretty decent kids to pretty solidly planted in the delinquent camp. And generally, the more delinquent types had a whole handful of rationalizations for their behavior. And it's very dangerous to have those rationalizations at hand because most forms of antisocial behavior or avoidant behavior, for that matter, are very bad medium to long-term strategies. So anyways, what negative psychological elements of yours do you think the victimization narrative supported and what positive aspects did it suppress?

Well, the negative ones that it supported were wanting to be mad at my circumstances and to not see any way I might be responsible for changing them, right? Yeah, so justification for I was looking for that justification. Yeah, the other thing that it does—and I don't know if it was unique to me because I think there are variations of it in everybody—but it just means that you don't feel the burden of solving a problem, right? I mean, it's hard to walk around feeling like if you worked a little bit harder, if you listened to people who care about you, if you, you know, just made the effort and put the time in, that maybe things could be different. That makes you feel responsible for that, and when that comes with the possibility of failing, right? Yes, it's scary to think that you could do something and if you don't get it, then you're failing out.

Yeah, so that's another interesting thing about that assumption of learned helplessness is that if you don't try—Homer Simpson told Bart, "If you never try, you can't fail." Okay, great. Right, right, so that's very comical. So that was definitely, I would say, like a negative part of my thinking that wanting to see myself as a victim supported. In terms of the positive stuff that it kind of pushed down, I think it meant that I, for example, was willing to put my mom through some really—I did some really difficult situations where she had to stress and worry about me and what I was doing. And I would later learn that I have a positive power to actually bring value to her life and to make things easier for her and to help her raise my sisters and things like that. Those are strengths that I had; that is a desire for responsibility and to be part of a family that I had, that I didn't learn about myself until later on because I couldn't see myself as someone who had assets, right, who had strengths to offer. Yeah, it was always about what other people were doing to me, yeah, not about how I might positively affect somebody else or at minimum not negatively.

Right, right, well; which is definitely something. Well, yeah, so one of the things that's interesting with regards to the conversation about responsibility, because one of the things that I've been talking to audiences about all around the world now is the idea that maybe we find the sustaining meaning in their life precisely through the adoption of responsibilities. And, you know, you talked about reasons to be terrified of responsibility, and I think those are valid reasons: what if you try and fail, especially when there's a fair bit of evidence around that that might be either the most likely path. And it is in some sense because you have to often try a lot of things before you succeed, even if you turn out to be a successful person. But the price that you pay for abandoning that responsibility is that that is where you find the meaning in life that can buttress you against the fact that life is unfair and, and, and, what would you call typify by suffering and also by malevolence and betrayal? You know, you talked about discovering later in life that you could be a positive asset to your family, and that's a big discovery, man. It's really something to be able to wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night and think, "Well, you know, at least I'm doing something positive for the people that love me." To not have that's really a bad thing.

Absolutely. The other thing is you kind of tune out a lot of the people in your life who might have really important things to say to you, right? Who might possess some genuine wisdom, but because what they're saying doesn't line up with the ideology you've unknowingly, in most cases, clung to so strongly, you don't hear them. And so the good people in your life that actually might be able to teach you something and put the right idea in your head and plant a seed that could grow into something beautiful, those people become less important to you. And instead, the folks who are manipulative, in some cases, who want to tell you negative things and want you to believe that you can't do something, like you might, you are destined to suffer until the evil system around has collapsed, people who tell you that or variations of that message are the folks that you hear from. And that's sad because when I look back, there were good people in my life, and there were people at my school who did do really well. And I would say, in fact, maybe most people in my community made really good decisions and cared for each other and did really good things. And yeah, I was trapped in a world where I couldn't see them. They didn't even exist in my narrative about my life. Those people were either anomalies or they just didn't—they were not part of my worldview at all.

Yeah. Well, the thing is too is that people who start down the bad road, let's say the bad road sake that's characterized by irresponsibility, avoidance, and a kind of a cruel rebellion, you know, they're also—they also tend to be quite annoyed and irritated by counterexamples, and so they are likely to manipulate someone else, a younger person, for example, or their peers into participating in behaviors that aren't in anyone's best interest. Because they don't want the counterexamples around and why would you if you don't want to be—you don't want to have your cynicism proved wrong because that's too shattering, you know, even though it would be the best thing for you.

Yeah, absolutely. Right? I think that's absolutely right. And the transition I wound up experiencing, where I get out of high school and kind of find my voice, comes out of some things that were completely unintentional, right? So I get to this point in grade 11 after I rewrite the literacy tests that we have to take in Ontario public schools. I am finally considered literate. So that means I can finish high school, and I get very desperate to earn money because I didn't see a future where I could earn money legally. I thought I would have to be a criminal. I genuinely believed that was my destiny. And so I come close to buying a gun, and I asked a friend for it. He quotes me a price, he says, "Let me know when you want it." And I go home on a day where I thought I was going to feel like a million bucks because I finally had this tool of a criminal enterprise that I had been looking forward to, and I wind up just like crying my eyes out, and I was devastated. And I was scared, and I thought, “If my mom found out I had a gun, she might give up on me and disown me.”

I was okay. So that's interesting. So part of what called out to you when you were making what would have been a life-changing decision was the violation of the intimate relationship that you had—the love that you had, that your mother had bestowed on you. So you were...yeah, you felt deeply, by all appearances, that you were betraying that. What else brought you to tears? Because you said, you know, you felt, you thought that one possibility was that you'd feel somewhat triumphant in finally managing this task and joining the cast of outcasts, but that isn't how your conscience responded.

No, my conscience responded with fear, knowing how owning a gun sends you into a spiral. I had seen other people go down, you know, when you own a gun as a young man, especially in a—if you intend to use it—you wind up having problems with people who have guns. And all of a sudden, just to walk around the street, you feel like you have to carry a gun on you for your own safety. Like if you look at the lives of young men who wind up either victims or perpetrators in inner-city gang violence, those are often young men who are committing what they call retaliatory violence, right? It is a web of responding to trauma and killings and I was very scared I would be in the middle of something like that. The other thing that really bothered me was a concern that I was so angry at police officers for how I'd seen them shoot my father when I was a kid and the treatment that I had experienced in terms of being followed around the mall or followed home from the bus stop and seeing things like I mentioned, you know, the Rodney King beating and having that be part of how I saw how the world worked, and it presented a certain kind of almost like a disturbing rite of passage, right? As a black man, I felt like, well, when that happens to you, that means you're growing up because people are supposed to think you're dangerous and a criminal.

And so, yeah, you know, there's even something about that that's true because I think that people are supposed to think that you're dangerous when you grow up. The question is, what do you do with the dangerousness? You know, so there is a—yeah, because you don't want to be naive and weak; it's not help.

Absolutely. But that there has to be a pathway to strength that isn't associated with catastrophe.

Yeah, well, in my case, it felt like I had already felt like I was being treated like someone who carried a gun around. There was something that really—I was almost disgusted by myself with the idea that I might validate that stereotype by then doing that thing, right? And there was this like conflated, it was a mix of shame that I felt, right, a mix of fear and a certain sense of, you know, worrying that I might never be able to come back from that decision. So what the positive effect all of that had on me is I wound up isolating myself from my social network, like all the friends I had who I'd spent years talking tough with and sharing, you know, gangster fairy tales and things like that. I wound up just not being able to show my face around them, like I was scared they would think I was a punk; I'm a chicken.

So you decided not to purchase the gun as a concept, I do not know.

Okay, and so, and that wound up changing really quickly. Because all the people I'd skipped class, or that I didn't want to see anymore and the people I was smoking drugs with, I didn't want to hang out with. And the people who, you know, I wasted so much of my time with, the people who we cultivated that kind of victimization identity together, no longer were part of my life, except for a few outliers. And so I unknowingly put myself in a situation where I could just think about the world differently and I started to go to class seriously for the first time. And I wasn't a good student overnight. I finished—I had to do day school and night school to graduate on time. And I just so badly wanted to get out of that building, that high school. So I just left. And the way to leave was to get my credits. So I graduated, I wound up at Humber College because in one of the transfer programs.

Let's go through that in a bit more detail because it's pretty quite a remarkable story. So, okay, so you had a choice point in your life and the choice point was whether or not you were going to, well, become armed and dangerous fundamentally. Yeah, and take that particular path. And you decided not to. You had a crisis of conscience. You decided not to, and that, in the—that allowed you or forced you, hard to say which, to alienate you from your peers. But that must have been very lonesome. Like how did you put up with that?

Yeah, it wasn't easy, and this is actually one of the hardest things that I talk about with young men who are going through similar experiences as I'm describing in terms of negative peer pressure is, it's really hard to accept being alone. And I don't know why I was able to do it, quite honestly, because I look back and I think, I'm not sure at 31 I could do it.

Yeah, right, exactly. That's exactly what I'm asking. It's quite—because it's a huge transformation not only to start buckling down at school, especially at that age because, you know, you had 16 years of not being disciplined, let's say, and also isolating yourself from your peers at a point where arguably there's nothing more important than that peer association. So, and what did your mother make of this? I mean all of a sudden you weren't seeing your friends and you were studying. I mean, she must have been shocked.

I'm not sure she knew what was going on, to be honest, because we didn't communicate much. Like we lived in the same house, but she was so busy just trying to, you know, get to the next day and pay the bills and make sure we had a house and everything we needed that I didn't really have an adult in my life who was providing any supervision.

Right, right. For example, my mom never signed off for—in all four years of high school, she never signed off those papers you're supposed to say, “I'm acknowledging you saw your kids' report card,” because I would just forge it and bring it in. And she never said anything because she wasn't paying attention. I didn't say anything to her. And so we had this period of time where we were just ships passing in the night that we had barely any interaction. But she still revered—there was a phrase you used in your conversation with a group of boys for the BBC radio at a boxing club where you said you need someone in your life who represents the light at the end of the tunnel.

Yeah, and that's what my mom was to me, like even when we didn't talk, even when I was angry at her for picking my father and putting me in a situation where I had a parent who rejected me and I resented her for it. And yet she still had this belief in me that never went away, this belief that at some point, Jamil could be better than he's proven himself to be, right?

So she was...

That's interesting! So it wasn't just her. It was also the fact that you had someone around that actually had more faith in you than you did.

Exactly, yeah. And I think that's such a key part.

Yeah, I agree. When you really need that from a parent, if you get that from both parents, you're unbelievably fortunate, but you desperately need it from at least one person. Someone's gotta believe in you.

Yeah, so the reason I get comfortable I guess with loneliness is, you know, and this is I think the role that the internet still plays in people's lives, which is, when you break away from an in-person social network at a school or a workplace or whatever the case, the internet becomes the place where you can find an alternative social network. And in my case, I was on these, you know, these hip-hop message boards all the time when I was a kid. I was always online reading about hip-hop and, like, conspiracy theories, and I got caught up in a lot of, like, Nation of Islam doctrine and propaganda. And those ideas were especially helpful, to be honest, in some cases. I think they delayed my ability to shake off the victimization identity I had adopted, but what it did do for me was it just gave me an alternative place to belong. And so, yeah, those became the social networks I had were online relationships. And I think that was part of how I was able to adjust away from my friend circle was that I just had a bunch of stuff on the internet that I could go to and feel like I was connecting with people in another way.

Okay, now also now you said something interesting. You said that you really wanted to get out of that building—and speaking about your school—but the way that you chose to get out was to path to graduate and pass was to accomplish the tasks. Now, why in the world did you decide that that was a good idea?

I suppose that's also because I wasn't sure what else I would do. Like at the point, you know, I was a kid who I did my grade 10 career project, my career project saying that I was going to be the Canadian Suge Knight, right? Who's a gangster who started a record label that produced Tupac and Snoop Dogg and these guys? That's what I thought my future was gonna be like. And when that gets taken from you because you realize you're in this game of chicken you've been playing with yourself, you're going to lose it. And so you get off the train tracks; you don't really know what else to do. And I just thought I have to just walk the path that was available to me, which was, okay, so go through school.

Hey, well, that's a brilliant observation, I think, because one of the things that people have often asked me when they're directionless is, "Well, what should I do?" And the answer is, "Well, you take the best path that's laid out ahead of you." Alright? If you don't have an option where you are, staying in despair not moving forward is a very bad option. If you have a bad pathway forward or a suboptimal pathway forward, let's say, but it's at least forward, then that's the one you should choose. And so you decided that you were gonna buckle down and get the hell out of school and you were gonna do it by passing.

Yeah, well, I don’t know, I didn't feel like I was choosing to do it by passing. I just thought that was my way out, and I wasn't sure how else to get out.

Alright, because in the process of trying to, you know, rush out, right? I'm working as a dishwasher at Red Lobster. I'm taking night classes. I'm taking day classes. I'm trying to get out of my circumstances as quickly as I can. The guidance counselor says to me, “But you don't qualify for many programs. You were streamed in the applied system, which is what we call in Ontario, which means you can't go to university. You've got to go to community college. But your grades are so bad, there's no community college program you could get into except for what they call the General Arts and Sciences program, which in some ways is almost like what grade 13 used to be in Ontario, which is you would learn a lot of the things you should have learned in grade 12 but didn't.” And so I go into that program, and I would say what changed for me immediately in terms of my academics was this is the first time I had college professors who said to me, “Here, you've got to write this, you know, twenty-page essay. You get to decide what it's about.” And it seems so simple, but it was a breakthrough for me because what that meant was the part of me that was interested in, you know, hip-hop and the Nation of Islam and conspiracy theories and all that stuff I was doing on the internet, that no adult had ever seen before. Nope. My mom, my teachers, no one had ever seen a part of me that could think critically, that had curiosity intellectually. That part of me and the version of me that was going to school merged for the first time, right?

Well, thank God! That's a huge advantage of higher education is that—is exactly what should happen, right?

So, absolutely. Yeah, and that's what I try to tell young men all the time is like you might be going through a hard time in high school, and it's hard sometimes to know how life could mine is going to be different if you just stay the course because you have no reference point to explain it. But in my case, it was a meaningful shift. Like the idea that I could write twenty pages about, you know, Malcolm X or about Tupac, like all of a sudden the writing ability that I had never shown people before started to come out and my analytical thinking, and all—it just flowed out of me. And literally in less than a year, I went from barely getting out of high school to getting the highest grades in all of Humber College. And that was not something that ever felt deliberate. I was just kind of stumbling around in the dark and hoping things were gonna work out for the better. My mom, for example, when she came to my graduation at Humber, like she was shocked that I’d gotten the President’s Medal for highest grades. Like she had no idea that I was actually a completely different person by that point.

Well, you said something interesting too about what you were doing in high school. You said that you were attending classes during the day and at night and you were working as a dishwasher.

As a dishwasher, right? Yes.

Yeah, okay. So that's interesting too because one of the things that's very useful, I think, to point out to people who are in a situation that's analogous to the one that you found yourself in is that there is something to be said for trying to make yourself so busy that it's absolutely ridiculous. You know, to take on a big burden, that's part of that burden of responsibility. It's like, okay, can I go to school during the day and can I go to school at night and can I also work at a job? Can I do all that? Because the answer is I’ve seen this time and time again with undergraduates who start to work in my lab, it's like they're already taking a full course load and they're busy, and some of them also have work, you know, they have part-time jobs. And then they come and work in the lab, and so then they're so busy that it's just ridiculous. And then they have to get organized, and they can't waste time, and their grades almost inevitably go up, not down.

Yeah, and it's one of those things where before you get to a point where you get busy like that, you have no idea you're capable of accomplishing so many things. And then it starts to become normal to achieve, right? It's normal to say, oh, I could set out and accomplish something in a given day.

Or it also becomes something that's really interesting to experiment with because once you stir—once you start realizing that your capability for responsibility exceeds your original expectations, you start to become curious about what the limitations of that are. It's like, oh, turns out I can do a lot more than I thought I could or that people told me I could or that I was willing to believe. How much more could I actually do if I really got my act together and got disciplined? It's like, there's a purpose, it's like, what are you made out of? And how do you find out? And I think you really need to find that out as a—you certainly have to find that out as a young man. You probably have to find that I was a person in general, but it's absolutely crucial for young men to find out that there’s far more to them than they think, and you can't find that out without burdening yourself.

You're right. And it is, it's the opposite of what we were talking about earlier in terms of that fear of failure, right? Because it's saying I'm gonna push myself to the limit and explore where that line of failing is. And because you're not running from that one, no, you're running toward...toward where it exists.

Absolutely. And the funny thing is about running towards that line is that as you walk towards it, it recedes, and as you get more disciplined, the probability that you'll fail gets smaller and smaller.

Perfect example of the pathology of avoidance, right? Because avoidance of that just makes you weak.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the transition from Humber College to York University, you know, it's just kind of a continuation of what you're describing, right? It's running to the line, and it's me continuing to say, "Okay, maybe that twelve years of evidence I have of being a really poor student could be proven wrong with every assignment that I do." Right? And leaving that if I try in this class and I get an A, and all of a sudden getting an A stops being the anomaly, it starts to become normal, right? And then when you don't get an A or a B or whatever you're hoping for, you start to feel that sting of disappointment because you actually have higher expectations of yourself. And your professors who didn't know you back when you were a knucklehead getting into trouble, they only know you as the guy who came into their class and tried hard. And so they start to speak to you as someone who could do really well too.

Yeah, because that's one of the things that's so lovely too about being able to go off to somewhere new, you know? Because you could leave your past identity behind you, at least some of it, you know? Some of it that you didn't want to carry ahead with you. And that's another thing about moving forward in the world is that you can leave the old and insufficient you behind. And that can be hard on you and hard on people around you too, but man, it's such a relief. It's, and it's such a—well, it's life itself, I would say. It's the opposite of despair.

And that's absolutely right, and I—as much as you can create the circumstances for that to happen in your life, even if you don't have a chance to move somewhere new or go to a new school or get a new job. But just convince yourself that renewal is something you get to decide and get to control. I mean, it's a—it's so part of being a victim is to is to notice all of a sudden that you have the capacity to transform yourself despite at least to a large degree despite external circumstances or, or sometimes even as a consequence of leveraging them. Because it isn't always obvious that that having an impediment is a catastrophe. Sometimes it's a—I mean, it's what would you call it? It's a call to action. It's a challenge.

Absolutely. And in some ways, the challenging periods of my life that we've covered provided a roadmap for what I would do with the remainder of my academic career, which is I would pursue opportunities where I could imagine going back in time and solving some of the problems I had experienced, right? And that I studied international development and nonprofit management at York. I went and did a law degree because I thought the law was relevant to my life in so far as it made a difference in how I wound up and how some of my peer group did, and that I was lucky to not be involved in the legal system. So, yeah, I mean it was a call to action for me, and I think it gave me the motivation but also the toughness I would need to push forward and do things that, you know, I had good reason to believe were impossible.

You know, because the victim narrative is something like, well, you're so little compared to what's arrayed against you in all of its historical catastrophe, right? Which is like the evil father. You're so little that you don't have a chance. And that's not good because you're not that little. And what's arrayed against you isn't that big. I mean, it's not that it's not big because it is big, but it's that you're nowhere near as little as you might have been enticed to think.

Exactly. And I think what you're describing is very—like I think most people hear that and would agree with you, but they just selectively apply it to different people in our society. Like, they want to tell some of us because of our circumstances that that's less true for some than others. And that's what—yeah, well, that's the sort of thing that really makes you wonder where the true racism is.

Yeah, and well, you know, as I travel around Canada and I go to other countries and I speak to young men who are in, in some cases, very difficult circumstances, I see over and over again how they're being denied that belief, that they're being told that that belief is somehow competing with recognition of unfairness. Yeah. I heard that despite John Henry-ISM, it's a new form of pathology identified by psychologists as the belief among minority young men that personal effort, and sacrifice, and responsibility will actually produce positive outcomes. It's actually for exactly the reasons that you just described, because it runs counter to the victim and oppressor narrative.

It's actually being treated by some people now as a form of psychological disorder.

Wow! Yeah, wow.

Yeah! And when you say those things, right, when you go to people who are in difficult circumstances and remind them, even to some small degree, that individual agency might matter, right? That it could affect their outcome, that they do not have—they're not destined to a life of suffering. People—there are a lot of people get threatened by that, right? And they feel like you're undermining the narrative that they desperately want to be true, which is that that young man has to suffer until everything else changes, right? That until we get rid of capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and all these other evils—right? Quote-unquote evils of our society that you—you will—you cannot have a good life until that is first dealt with. And asking people to sit around and wait for a kind of activist class to create this utopia for them, I find that to be very immoral and very bothersome because I see, you know, the biggest obstacles I have to getting my message out to young men are people who I would describe as, you know, victim celebrators, right? People who really, really want to celebrate when we're losing.

Because it fits their narrative, but ideas that might help us win are a lot less attractive.

Yeah, okay. So now you went off to York, and what happened when you went to York?

Well, I always jokingly say my life got really boring really quickly because I really just studied and did everything I was supposed to do. I was very careful about picking classes that I thought would build on the momentum I had picked up. So I wanted to study subject matter that would connect to things I previously learned because I still had a certain insecurity about going too far from where I had proven myself, you know? I don't know if I could have taken an economics class or a biology class or a psychology class because those are just subjects that didn't come—that I wasn't sure I could handle. So I was very careful about picking things I thought I could do well and things that in my free time I was thinking about, right? So issues around poverty and discrimination and activism and, you know, such tackling social issues, whether that was in the kind of Canadian context or elsewhere. Those are things that I felt comfortable with, and so I picked classes that fit that mold. And as I got more and more confident in myself, I started to branch out into other areas, so take an econ class or a class in marketing for nonprofit organizations or things like that.

And I had a—you know, my whole life up to that point was on one street that steals Avenue West, which is on the north end of Toronto. And, you know, where my mom lived, Humber College and York University are all off this street. So my world was very small in the sense that the same bus routes I had taken as a teenager were the same buses I took to Humber and the same bus I took to York. I got very much in a comfort zone there, right? Because I was saying to myself, "Okay, this is the world. I know this is the world I understand. I can be successful in this world." And so I clung to it and I didn't really do much to branch out. You know, I still worked in restaurants as a line cook and a dishwasher. I worked in warehouses even when I was getting A's. I didn't think, for instance, to apply to, like, a prestigious internship or to work at, you know, I wouldn't have known.

You wouldn't have known on that; you know, like when you come from about, like that, it's—when I went to University of Alberta, I didn't know any people who had had a graduate degree. I didn't know how to go about doing that, and so the idea that I could do that was really something that was quite new. You don't know the pathways, you know? I mean, you can figure them out, but if that's not right in your mill, you just don't know how. II don't know what basic steps to take. You don't exactly—yeah, there was this idea I came across in one of the international development classes I took, but it's an anthropology concept called the capacity to aspire from Arjun Appadurai, NYU. And it stuck with me because he uses it to explain how people achieve social mobility in India, and I think it applied really well to my life in Canada too, which is, you know, your imagination grows with the more paths you see in front of yourself. And we all might have a similar destination in mind in terms of what a good life looks like, right? I want a better house, a better car, someone who loves me, someone to love, but some of us have a better sense of the directions—the steps it takes to get to that destination than others.

And that idea stuck with me because it helped explain both the difference between myself and some of my peers in university who were more accustomed to opportunity, but it also explained the difference between me and my friends who were not in university and were not making some of the good choices I was and were still dealing with the consequences of how we grew up. Well, I have this program that I developed with my colleagues called the Future Authoring program that helps people make a develop a vision for their life along some of the dimensions you mentioned, but then—and then also to put together an implementable strategy. And we've never been able to tell if the utility of the program lies more in walking people through an actual—the actual process of developing a vision and a genuine strategy or suggesting to people that they're actually capable of doing that.

Right, so, and I often think it's the latter. It's like because the idea that you are self-transforming agent is an unbelievably powerful idea if you could—if it grips you, right? Or if you allow it to grip you, that might be another way of thinking about it. But it is certainly an idea that you cannot have or that you can be prematurely cynical about, which I think is—well, that's the sort of thing. It really makes you wonder where the true racism is.

Yeah, and well, you know, and as I travel around Canada and I go to other countries and I speak to young men who are in some cases very difficult circumstances I see over and over again how they're being denied that, that belief that they're being told that that belief is somehow competing with recognition of unfairness.

Yeah, I heard that despite John Henry-ism, it's a new form of pathology identified by psychologists as the belief among minority young men that personal effort and sacrifice and responsibility will actually produce positive outcomes. It's actually, for exactly the reasons that you just described, because it runs counter to the victim and oppressor narrative.

It's actually being treated by some people now as a form of psychological disorder.

Wow. Yeah, wow.

Yeah, and when you say those things, right, when you go to people who are in difficult circumstances and remind them even to some small degree that individual agency might matter, right? That it could affect their outcome, that they do not have—they're not destined to a life of suffering. People—there are a lot of people get threatened by that, right? And they feel like you're undermining the narrative that they desperately want to be true, which is that that young man has to suffer until everything else changes, right? That until we get rid of capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and all these other evils—right? Quote-unquote evils of our society that you—you will—you cannot have a good life until that is first dealt with. And asking people to sit around and wait for a kind of activist class to create this utopia for them, I find that to be very immoral and very bothersome because I see, you know, the biggest obstacles I have to getting my message out to young men are people who I would describe as, you know, victim celebrators, right? People who really, really want to celebrate when we're losing.

Because it fits their narrative, but ideas that might help us win are a lot less attractive.

Yeah, okay. So now you went off to York and, and what happened when you went to York?

Well, I always jokingly saved my life got really boring really quickly because I really just studied and did everything I was supposed to do. I like I am actually surprised by how hard I was able to work in those four years. I would—I took all—I was very careful about picking classes that I thought would build on the momentum I had picked up so I—I want to study subject matter that would connect to things I previously learned because I still had a certain insecurity about going too far from where I had proven myself, you know? I don't know if I could have taken an economics class or a biology class or a psychology class because those are just subjects that I wasn't sure I could handle. So I was very careful about picking things I thought I could do well—things that in my free time I was thinking about, right? So issues around poverty and discrimination and activism and, you know, tackling social issues whether that was in the Canadian context or elsewhere. Those were things that I felt comfortable with, and so I picked classes that fit that mold. And as I got more and more confident in myself, I started to branch out into other areas—so take an econ class or a class in marketing for nonprofit organizations or things like that.

And I had a—you know, my whole life up to that point was on one street that steals Avenue West, which is on the north end of Toronto. And you know where my mom lived, Humber College and York University are all off this street. So my world was very small in the sense that the same bus routes I had taken as a teenager were the same buses I took to Humber and the same bus I took to York. I I got very much in a comfort zone there, right? Because I was saying to myself, "Okay, this is the world. I know this is the world I understand. I can be successful in this world." And so I clung to it and I didn't really do much to branch out, you know? I still worked in restaurants as a line cook and a dishwasher. I worked in warehouses even when I was getting A's. I didn't think, for instance, to apply to like a prestigious internship or to work at, you know, I wouldn't have known.

You wouldn't have known on that; you know? Like when I went to University of Alberta, I didn't know any people who had had a graduate degree. I didn't know how to go about doing that. And so the idea that I could do that was really something that was quite new. You don't know the pathways, you know? I mean you can figure them out, but if that's not right in your mill, you just don't know how. I don't know what basic steps to take. You don't exactly know. Yeah, there was this idea I came across in one of the international development classes I took, but it's an anthropology concept called the capacity to aspire from Arjun Appadurai, NYU. And it stuck with me because he uses it to explain how people achieve social mobility in India, and I think it applied really well to my life in Canada too, which is, you know, your imagination grows with the more paths you see in front of yourself. And we all might have a similar destination in mind in terms of what a good life looks like, right? I want a better house, a better car, someone who loves me, someone to love. But some of us have a better sense of the directions—the steps it takes to get to that destination than others.

Right, so and I often think it's the latter. It's like because the idea that you are a self-transforming agent is an unbelievably powerful idea if you could—if it grips you, right? Or if you allow it to grip you, that might be another way of thinking about it. But it is certainly an idea that you cannot have or that you can be prematurely cynical about, which I think is—well, that's the sort of thing that really makes you wonder where the true racism is.

Yeah, and well, you know, as I travel around Canada and I go to other countries and I speak to young men who are in some cases very difficult circumstances I see over and over again how they're being denied that belief—that they're being told that that belief is somehow competing with recognition of unfairness.

Yeah, I heard that despite John Henry-ism, it's a new form of pathology identified by psychologists. As the belief among minority young men that personal effort and sacrifice and responsibility will actually produce positive outcomes. It's actually, for exactly the reasons that you just described, because it runs counter to the victim and oppressor narrative.

It's actually being treated by some people now as a form of psychological disorder.

Wow! Yeah, wow!

Yeah! And when you say those things, right, when you go to people who are in difficult circumstances and remind them even to some small degree that individual agency might matter, right? That it could affect their outcome, that they do not have—they're not destined to a life of suffering. People—there are a lot of people get threatened by that, right? And they feel like you're undermining the narrative that they desperately want to be true, which is that that young man has to suffer until everything else changes, right? That until we get rid of capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and all these other evils—right? Quote-unquote evils of our society that you—you will—you cannot have a good life until that is first dealt with. And asking people to sit around and wait for a kind of activist class to create this utopia for them, I find that to be very immoral and very bothersome because I see, you know, the biggest obstacles I have to getting my message out to young men are people who I would describe as, you know, victim celebrators, right? People who really, really want to celebrate when we're losing.

Because it fits their narrative, but ideas that might help us win are a lot less attractive.

Yeah, okay. So now you went off to York and, and what happened when you went to York?

Well, I always jokingly saved my life got really boring really quickly because I really just studied and did everything I was supposed to do. I like I am actually surprised by how hard I was able to work in those four years. I would—I took all—I was very careful about picking classes that I thought would build on the momentum I had picked up so I—I want to study subject matter that would connect to things I previously learned because I still had a certain insecurity about going too far from where I had proven myself, you know? I don't know if I could have taken an economics class or a biology class or a psychology class because those are just subjects that I wasn't sure I could handle. So I was very careful about picking things I thought I could do well—things that in my free time I was thinking about, right? So issues around poverty and discrimination and activism and, you know, tackling social issues in the Canadian context or elsewhere. Those were things that I felt comfortable with, and so I picked classes that fit that mold. And as I got more and more confident in myself, I started to branch out into other areas—take an econ class or a class in marketing for nonprofit organizations or things like that.

And I had a—you know, my whole life up to that point was on one street that steals Avenue West, which is on the north end of Toronto. And, you know, where my mom lived, Humber College and York University are all off this street. So my world was very small in the sense that the same bus routes I had taken as a teenager were the same buses I took to Humber and the same bus I took to York. I I got very much in a comfort zone there, right? Because I was saying to myself, "Okay, this is the world. I know this is the world that I understand. I can be successful in this world." And so I clung to it and I didn't really do much to branch out, you know? I still worked in restaurants as a line cook and a dishwasher. I worked in warehouses even when I was getting A's. I didn't think, for instance, to apply to like a prestigious internship or to work at; you know, I wouldn't have known.

You wouldn’t have known on that; you know? Like when I went to University of Alberta, I didn’t know any people who had had a graduate degree. I didn’t know how to go about doing that and, so the idea that I could do that was really something that was quite new. You don't know the pathways, you know ? I mean you can figure them out but, if that's not right in your mill, you just don't know how. I don't know what basic steps to take. You don't know exactly? Yeah, there was this idea I came across in one of the international development classes I took, but it's an anthropology concept called the capacity to aspire from Arjun Appadurai, NYU. And it stuck with me because he uses it to explain how people achieve social mobility in India, and I think it applied really well to my life in Canada too which is, you know, your imagination grows with the more paths you see in front of yourself. We all might have a similar destination in mind in terms of what a good life looks like, right? I want a better house—a better car—someone who loves me—someone to love, but some of us have a better sense of the directions—the steps it takes to get to that destination than others.

And that idea stuck with me because it helped explain both the difference between myself and some of my peers in university who were more accustomed to opportunity, but it also explained the difference between me and my friends who were not in university and were not making some of the good choices I was and were still dealing with the consequences of how we grew up. Well, I have this program that I developed with my colleagues called the Future Authoring Program that helps people make a—develop a vision for their life along some of the dimensions you mentioned, but then, and then also to put together an implementable strategy, and we've never been able to tell if the utility of the program lies more in walking people through an actual—the actual process of developing a vision and a genuine strategy or suggesting to people that they're actually capable of doing that.

Yeah, and well, you know, as I travel around Canada and I go to other countries and I speak to young men who are in some cases very difficult circumstances, I see over and over again how they're being denied that belief, that they're being told that that belief is somehow competing with recognition of unfairness.

Yeah, I heard that despite John Henry-ism, it's a new form of pathology identified by psychologists as the belief among minority young men that personal effort and sacrifice and responsibility will actually produce positive outcomes. It's actually, for exactly the reasons that you just described because it runs counter to the victim and oppressor narrative.

It's actually being treated by some people now as a form of psychological disorder.

Wow, yeah.

Because it fits their narrative but ideas that might help us win are a lot less attractive.

Yeah, okay. So now you went off to York and what happened when you went to York?

Well, I always jokingly say my life got really boring really quickly because I really just studied and did everything I was supposed to do. I was very careful about picking classes that I thought would build on the momentum I had picked up. So I wanted to study subject matter that would connect to things I previously learned because I still had a certain insecurity about going too far from where I had proven myself, you know? I don't know if I could have taken an economics class or a biology class or a psychology class because those are just subjects that I wasn't sure I could handle. So I was very careful about picking things I thought I could do well—things that in my free time I was thinking about, right? So issues around poverty and discrimination and activism and, you know, tackling social issues whether that was in the Canadian context or elsewhere. Those were things that I felt comfortable with, and so I picked classes that fit that mold. And as I got more and more confident in myself, I started to branch out into other areas so take an econ class or a class in marketing for nonprofit organizations or things like that.

And I had a—you know, my whole life up to that point was on one street that steals Avenue West, which is on the north end of Toronto and you know where my mom lived, Humber College, and York University are all off this street. So my world was very small in the sense that the same bus routes I had taken as a teenager were the same buses I took to Humber and the same bus I took to York. I I got very much in a comfort zone there, right? Because I was saying to myself, "Okay, this is the world, I know this is the world I understand. I can be successful in this world." And so I clung to it and I didn't really do much to branch out, you know? I still worked in restaurants as a line cook and a dishwasher. I worked in warehouses even when I was getting A's. I didn't think, for instance, to apply to like a prestigious internship or to work at; you know, I wouldn't have known.

You wouldn't have known on that; you know? Like when I went to University of Alberta, I didn’t know any people who had had a graduate degree. I didn’t know how to go about doing that, and so the idea that I could do that was really something that was quite new. You don't know the pathways, you know? I mean you can figure them out but, if that's not right in your mill, you just don't know how. I don't know what basic steps to take. You don't know exactly? Yeah, there was this idea I came across in one of the international development classes I took, but it's an anthropology concept called the capacity to aspire from Arjun Appadurai, NYU. And it stuck with me because he uses it to explain how people achieve social mobility in India, and I think it applied really well to my life in Canada too which is, you know, your imagination grows with the more paths you see in front of yourself. We all might have a similar destination in mind in terms of what a good life looks like, right? I want a better house—a better car—someone who loves me—someone to love, but some of us have a better sense of the directions—the steps it takes to get to that destination than others.

And that idea stuck with me because it helped explain both the difference between myself and some of my peers in university who were more accustomed to opportunity, but it also explained the difference between me and my friends who were not in university and were not making some of the good choices I was and were still dealing with the consequences of how we grew up. Well, I have this program that I developed with my colleagues called the Future Authoring Program that helps people make a—develop a vision for their life along some of the dimensions you mentioned, but then, and then also to put together an implementable strategy, and we've never been able to tell if the utility of the program lies more in walking people through an actual—the actual process of developing a vision and a genuine strategy or suggesting to people that they're actually capable of doing that.

Right, so and I often think it's the latter. It's like, because the idea that you are a self-transforming agent is an unbelievably powerful idea if you could—if it grips you, right? Or if you allow it to grip you, that might be another way of thinking about it. But it is certainly an idea that you cannot have or that you can be prematurely cynical about, which I think is—well, that's the sort of thing that really makes you wonder where the true racism is.

Yeah, I heard that despite John Henry-ism, it's a new form of pathology identified by psychologists as the belief among minority young men that personal effort and sacrifice and responsibility will actually produce positive outcomes. It's actually for exactly the reasons that you just described because it runs counter to the victim and oppressor narrative.

It's actually being treated by some people now as a form of psychological disorder.

Wow, yeah.

Because it fits their narrative but ideas that might help us win are a lot less attractive.

Yeah, okay. So now you went off to York and, and what happened when you went to York?

Well, I always jokingly saved my life got really boring really quickly because I really just studied and did everything I was supposed to do. I like I am actually surprised by how hard I was able to work in those four years. I would—I took all—I was very careful about picking classes that I thought would build on the momentum I had picked up so I—I want to study subject matter that would connect to things I previously learned because I still had a certain insecurity about going too far from where I had proven myself, you know? I don't know if I could have taken an economics class or a biology class or a psychology class because those are just subjects that I wasn't sure I could handle. So I was very careful about picking things I thought I could do well—things that in my free time I was thinking about, right? So issues around poverty and discrimination and activism and, you know, tackling social issues whether that was in the Canadian context or elsewhere. Those were things that I felt comfortable with, and so I picked classes that fit that mold. And as I got more and more confident in myself, I started to branch out into other areas so take an econ class or a class in marketing for nonprofit organizations or things like that.

And I had a—you know, my whole life up to that point was on one street that steals Avenue West, which is on the north end of Toronto. And, you know, where my mom lived, Humber College and York University are all off this street. So my world was very small in the sense that the same bus routes I had taken as a teenager were the same buses I took to Humber and the same bus I took to York. I I got very much in a comfort zone there, right? Because I was saying to myself, "Okay, this is the world. I know this is the world I understand. I can be successful in this world." And so I clung to it and I didn't really do much to branch out, you know? I still worked in restaurants as a line cook and a dishwasher. I worked in warehouses even when I was getting A's. I didn't think, for instance, to apply to like a prestigious internship or to work at; you know, I wouldn't have known.

You wouldn’t have known on that; you know? Like when I went to University of Alberta, I didn’t know any people who had had a graduate degree. I didn’t know how to go about doing that, and so the idea that I could do that was really something that was quite new. You don't know the pathways, you know? I mean you can figure them out but, if that's not right in your mill, you just don't know how. I don't know

Jamil Jivani: Author of "Why Young Men"

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