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In the twinkling of an eye: Malcolm Gladwell tops best-seller lists with a stealth approach to race. His books probe the way fads catch fire and the mind's ability to process fact and prejudice quickly

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2005 by Angela Ards

Books by Malcolm Gladwell The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Back Bay Books (reprint), January 2002 $14.95, ISBN 0-316-34662-4

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Little, Brown and Company, January 2005 $25.95, ISBN 0 316-17232-4

RACE IN AMERICA often comes down to the politics of hair: the tighter the curl, the blacker the experience. A few years back, literary phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell discovered this absurd truism when he let his close-cut, blondish locks bolt into an Afro. The son of an English father and a Jamaican mother, Gladwell doesn't "look particularly black, especially to white people," he says, for, in terms of skin color, he inherited his father's. Once he grew out that hair, his Jamaican heritage stood out, quite literally, and police officers began giving him undue special attention: more speeding tickets, more street stops, even once accosting him as a suspected rapist on the loose.

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It's an experience most African American men have endured countless times. Gladwell, raised in Canada and biracial--"with the black half being West Indian"--had no points of reference for this particular black American experience. The two seconds it took those officers to link his Afro with criminality "radicalized and racialized" him, he says, more than any experience of his life--and informs the questions shaping his current nonfiction best-seller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown and Company, January 2005).

A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, Gladwell, 41, began his journalism career as a science writer at The Washington Post, where he covered the MDS epidemic and developed a knack for using medical paradigms to understand social issues. In his debut The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown and Company, February 2000), he took a phrase from the study of infectious disease to understand how ideas, products and fads, and even political causes reach mass appeal; how they "tip" into popularity. A red-hot best-seller in 2000, The Tipping Point itself tipped, staying on The New York Times list for weeks and introducing this obscure medical jargon into everyday conversation. (At presstime of this article, The Tipping Point was No. 1 in paperback nonfiction after 38 weeks on the list.)

Wisdom, Instinct, Prejudice

Blink, released in January and No. 2 in hardcover nonfiction at 16 weeks on the Times list as of May 15, mines research in the field of psychology about the unconscious mental processes we all use to size up a person or a situation with just a few telling details--for instance: Afro, male, black. Psychologists call these first impressions "rapid cognition" or "thin-slicing": rational thinking that has become so ingrained through experience and training that it's second nature, in stinctual. Gladwell presents dozens of fascinating stories about when these honed hunches are right on--as when art historians at the Getty Museum sensed on sight that a classical Greek statue was a forgery--and when they go tragically wrong--like the 1999 police killing in the Bronx of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, whose wallet officers mistook for a gun. If "we paid more attention to these fleeting moments," Gladwell argues, learning when to trust those first impressions and when to check them, it could change our everyday lives for the better.

Blink, as in "blink of an eye," could just as easily have been titled Wisdom and Prejudice. Sure judgments based on experience and training are the very definition of wisdom, while associations based on mere physical attributes constitute prejudice. As a once-aspiring advertising executive, Gladwell has the ad man's ear for the catchy phrase that creates "buzz." His blockbuster titles have been topping both the paperback and hardback nonfiction lists. Not since literary icons Toni Morrison and Alice Walker appeared together on the fiction list in the late '80s, or Terry McMillan's breakout romance Waiting to Exhale, which spent weeks on the list in 1992, has a black writer so dominated national best-selling charts.

Of course, more than buzz is behind Gladwell's success. With their promised insights into the rational dynamics of change, how the smallest action or a single individual can make a difference, The Tipping Point and Blink tap into the Zeitgeist, a deep social longing to make sense of an increasingly frenetic and irrational world.

Buzz and the Zeitgeist aside, however, one can never underestimate the power of a good story to captivate audiences, and Gladwell's a genius of a storyteller. One of his favorite techniques he uses to connect with readers is the direct "you" address: "imagine you are...." "What if I told you...?" "The feeling that I'm trying to capture is the feeling of having a conversation with me," he says. "I want the reader to imagine that we're on a long car drive and I'm telling them a story."

In the twinkling of an eye: Malcolm Gladwell tops best-seller lists with a stealth approach to race. His books probe the way fads catch fire and the mind's ability to process fact and prejudice quickly

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2005 by Angela Ards

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