This means we don’t just obsess upon our financial results; we look at our long-term impact on the communities we serve and we adapt policies and programs to be a positive force. And, given there’s much less cofounders’ drama than most other companies, our employees can focus on how this start-up, which became one of the world’s most valuable hospitality companies nearly overnight, can live its mission helping our customers ‘belong anywhere.

Put more generally: In settings that are important to us and where we could be devalued based on stereotypes about our identity, we feel safer with our own kind.

3. Churn Has an Antidote

When we trust, we accept. When we distrust, we resist. We look for alternative meanings and scenarios. And if the situation is important, we do this a lot; we churn.

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.

A big way that poverty undermines schooling is to make it seem irrelevant to one’s life.