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

Clemens 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 had the highest grades at Humber College by the age of 18

Scholarship to Yale Law School by 22 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 corporate lawyer at Tory's LLP 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 raged race and the crisis of identity

U.s. International

Publication by st. Martin's Press in may 2000 nineteen

He's also

And unfortunately being diagnosed with cancer

Battling stage four non-hodgkins lymphoma cancer 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 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 Bennett last year 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 you know 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 and

shared though that that experience with in 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 and 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 and

I feel very privileged today and we'll 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 the US Edition will have a similar cover and

Yeah, it's been it's been 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 it's a

And there's a there's a responsibility that comes with to take

the opportunity of an audience and do 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. So

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 and

It's not like books are everybody's friend

so that

The act of literate audience is actually a rather small minority of people and 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 a

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 write 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 and 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 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 no a very high academic achiever by the age of 18

It's like so I'm curious about the interplay

I'm curious about that period about how that happened and and and and what it Manton 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 I would maybe describe myself as someone who was the 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 and

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 was missing was the desire to show that that those good parts of me to anyone?

So what do you taking was? What do you think? It was exactly that?

produced that

sense of

Despair despair that possessed you when you were 16

I mean you you outlined some of it, you know

You lived in a neighborhood that was well an immigrant neighborhood and and 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 in a variety of extremely positive directions

Like, how do you 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 out of my peer group as well not having a father around

And 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, too

Explain my frustrations were tools that encouraged me to I think live in us with a certain kind of

Victim identity as my default right that I could for example lit

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 determine 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 so. Ok

So how much of that I'm curious about that?

I mean that it's a common 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 and there's nothing wrong with being bothered that way but the problem too is 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 that

excuse is often masked by a

self justification that's associated with

That hypothetical stressed striving for justice

You know because it's 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 and

Right because there's a psychological element and a sociological element there that are at play. So so

Tell me what you think about that then tell me how you progress 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 they 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 and an

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 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 home working 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 of where my life turns out. That's a

Yes, you know that's when those talking points

Become a potential

You know kind of poisonous moral environment for you to live in because

maasai collage achill concept that my friend JD writes about hillbilly elegy in the context of

poverty in Appalachia 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

All right, but the funny thing is about learned helplessness, you know

And then this is something that I think it's really reasonable for us to delve into is that in the animal in the animal?

Experimental world which is where the concept of learned helplessness emerges what happens that to produce learned helplessness

What you do is you you punish an animal for any sort of active behavior

No matter what it does

It's hopeless and it 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 and

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 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 a as an

Adolescent let's say and you had the choice between doing your homework and putting forward your 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

catastrophic ly 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 other

young men whether they're your peers or people you even just

listen to in the music and music or you see on television or whatever the case you see their attempts and failures as