Why Young Men
Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award
The day after the 2015 Paris terror attacks, twenty-eight-year-old Canadian Jamil Jivani opened the newspaper to find that the men responsible were familiar to him. He didn’t know them, but the communities they grew up in and the challenges they faced mirrored the circumstances of his own life. Jivani travelled to Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadi radicalization. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men who lived in the same neighbourhood as him.
Jivani was raised in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration. Having grown up with a largely absent father, he knows what it is to watch a man’s future influenced by gangster culture or radical ideologies associated with Islam. Jivani found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised.
Why Young Men is not a memoir but a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this passionate account, lawyer and activist Jivani lays out a vision for keeping young black and Muslim men from becoming radicalized by violent movements such as the Nation of Islam, ISIS, and the alt-right. For young men's vulnerability to radicalization, Jivani blames a multigenerational cycle of fatherlessness, the sense of belonging offered by conflict-centered organizations that "focus on fear and vengeance," the daily realities of systemic racism, and distrust of the police. He sees the antidote in local community groups aligned with social ideals, sharing lessons he learned while working with Newark's Fathers Now, Brussels youth organizations JES and Association de Jeunes Morocains, and Ohio's Community Action Agencies. He also recounts his own success story of growing up in a troubled home in an immigrant neighborhood in Ontario and experimenting with hip-hop culture and the Nation of Islam spin-off the Five Percenters, before eventually finding the "capacity to aspire" and becoming a Yale-educated lawyer. He argues for building allyship with the police, criticizes Black Lives Matter for ideological railroading, and sympathizes with those who feel implicated in the "whitelash" of anti-Trump narratives. Younger and more left-leaning readers won't find Jivani's outlook palatable, but it will resonate for readers with more traditional, centrist views.
