Things like: How are people like me seen and treated here? Will I be supported here? Will it be a fair place for people like me? Diversity puts us in a state of mind in which identity is top of mind. Stressful emotions can arise. Thoughts scramble as we work to decipher and make meaning. To capture the anxious, ruminative nature of this state, my term for it is “churn,” a term whose utility I suspect will increase as the diversity of our life settings increases.

The common presumption is that biases like racism, sexism, and homophobia are the chief corrosives of diversity. And the are bad, to be sure. What I’m arguing is that churn is a further corrosive— in many common situations, as corrosive as prejudices themselves. Is the white teacher avoiding a needed conversation with Black parents because she is prejudiced, or because she is worried that a misstep in the conversation could get her seen as racist? Is it prejudice? Or is it churn that makes her hesitate? The point is that reducing churn can sometimes be as important in diverse setting as reducing prejudice itself.

Admittedly, this idea asks for an expansion of our thinking.

That is, whereas our attitudes are often weak drivers of our behavior, our behavior is often a strong driver of our attitudes— our attitudes often change to fit or justify how we behave more than they cause behavior in the first place. For example, if we live segregated lives— the behavior— then prejudicial attitudes will likely arise to justify that segregation. So if building trust and reducing churn enables people to be comfortable with each other in diverse settings— think of the parents and teacher in the opening vignette— the prejudices that justified their separation may fade, replaced by attitudes that justify their coming together.

But Black students have lived with their racial identity. They know it can matter. They didn’t know that it would matter in this instance. But they knew it could. Thus their predicament. To be safe, not to be misled, they were less trusting. They stayed in churn.

Such caution has its costs. There could be value in that feedback. It might help them with their essay and their writing generally. Trusting less means they’d miss out on that benefit. And this would happen over and over in a diverse school.

Transitions often involve ambiguity over how to cope effectively in the new setting. They instigate in all of us a search for what the challenges are, and for how best to meet them. But for those negatively stereotyped in the setting, this search has an extra consideration. It inevitably raises the possibility that they may face bias— devaluation, low expectations, little tolerance for error, little willingness to be associated with— and then the further worry about how to cope with all of this.