Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it used to be. It used to be 87 percent. Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behavior, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I’m on their TV talk show or whatever. I speed or run an aging yellow light or don’t come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do what I did, or insisting that I did not in fact do it.

Each one is an opportunity to build public trust in police or erode it, to strengthen the bridge with the community or undermine it.

The Stanford study raises a host of important questions. It’s easy to call police officers racist or point to this as evidence that the police are out to get African Americans. And that is certainly one way to see the results.

But the truth is likely both subtler and more complex.

Some individual officers may be racist. And given the broader actions of individual officers in particular high-profile cases, this is almost certainly the case.

But regardless, even if it isn’t intentional, a much larger portion of officers are treating White and Black people differently. Most officers likely mean well and are simply doing the best they can in difficult situations. But whether they realize it or not and whether they mean to or not, the words they use differ. And this makes the underlying problem even more challenging to solve.

If snow melts from the edges, it behooves you to have mechanisms in place to see what is going on there. This is a prescription widely made by futurists, such as Amy Webb in her brilliant book The Signals Are Talking. And yet, when I consider how many executives I work with spend their time, getting to the edges is one of the last things on their agenda.

’Waar is jou pas?’ the officer barked. My grandfather showed his booklet, but the police said something was wrong. The next thing my dad remembers is being at the police station in Orlando, where he sat waiting, helpless, as his father was taken to another room and sjamboked. Finally, my grandfather was let go. He and my dad walked home in silence. They never spoke about it, or the myriad other daily degradation they experienced. They buried the pain and kept going.