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.

Foreshadowing a chief hope of this book, Richeson and Shelton show that, using classic measures of racial bias, people found to be less biased, and subjects who have had more intergroup contact, are less stressed by diversity. We should keep hope alive. Still, taken as a whole, the research makes one thing clear: “Diversifying” a setting can cause stress and churn unless something is done to mitigate the effect.

Virtually every identity is negatively stereotyped in some way.

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.

Was wiseness a strategy for everyone? Would people with less enfranchised identities, those occupying lesser roles in the Wilkerson play, be comfortable using it?

For these people— women, minorities, gays, white men in diversity workshops, low-income earners— hearing that they should offer “trust” in diverse settings could trigger more “remembering” than “forgetting.” And there waiting for them is a compelling argument: “How can I trust people from groups that have done bad things to my group, people who benefit from advantages won by those bad things, people who often justify those advantages with dehumanizing stereotypes of my group, people who often see my group’s progress not as a good thing, or as justice-restoring, but as a zero-sum loss? Wouldn’t being ‘wise’ just make me more vulnerable to them— women to men, Blacks to whites, gays to straights?” And their churn wouldn’t stop there. It would also ask: “Why does responsibility for building trust in these settings fall to me? Shouldn’t it be first the responsibility of the more empowered?

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.