People who are privileged like to pretend that there is some logic to their status. "In my mind it is just a reminder of the essential arbitrariness of privilege. "As a result of this problematic union in the 18th century, the offspring were granted special privileges, privileges that were sustained and accentuated over the years to the point where my mother grew up in what would be, in Jamaican terms, a middle class upbringing. And then the offspring of that union is where you get my mother and me and my brother. In the family history - the original - a beautiful young slave woman gets off the boat in the mid 18th century and is purchased by a British landowner who then takes her as his mistress. Why Malcolm Gladwell believes humans are terrible at detecting lies - and why we all need to get better at it.They really did think that the rest of the world would be better off if they just behaved like Englishmen." "The British, bless their heart, had many qualities and one was an extraordinary self-regard. It was a series of of Victorian white women from England descending on Jamaica to teach Jamaicans how to be "English women." Problematic because, in a sense, it was so Victorian England. "My grandfather was part of that coming-of-age, and my mother and her sister got a scholarship to a Victorian English boarding school on the other side of the island, where she received what she would describe as a very fine, if somewhat problematic education. My mother and her sister got a scholarship to a Victorian English boarding school on the other side of the island, where she received what she would describe as a very fine, if somewhat problematic education. It was in that moment in the 30s, 40s and 50s, when Jamaica was becoming a country on the cusp of its independence. It's a recounting of part of her childhood and I think she would describe her childhood as fairly idyllic. "My mother wrote a memoir Brown Face, Big Master, which is one of my favourite books.
"My mother grew up in a little tiny town called Harewood. Her father and mother were teachers in the little local school next door. With her twin sister, they went to university in London and there she met my father, who was an Englishman. In 2012, Malcolm Gladwell spoke to Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the Toronto Reference Library as part of Jamaica 50, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jamaican independence. He started his journalism career at the Washington Post, where he worked for nine years before moving to the New Yorker.
(Toronto Public Library)īorn in England in 1963 to a Jamaican mother and English father, Gladwell grew up in Elmira, Ont. and attended the University of Toronto.
Malcolm Gladwell speaking to Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the Toronto Reference Library in 2012.
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