It follows that an important route to fairness is to reduce these biases, to be identity-blind, not meted out based on identity. And for prejudices that prove difficult to eliminate, we want to mitigate the unfair effects— as when musicians are auditioned from behind a screen so their sex wont influence judgements of their musicianship.

People are likely to take assertions of color blindness the way Calogero took Jane’s assertions that she liked Italian boys— as a well-intended hope for society but, perhaps inadvertently, as a denial of their lived experience— a personal claim of innocence more than a real commitment to a more just society.

Like Calogero, to trust, they would need a more concrete signal, like a gracefully unlocked car door, that tells them that in this setting, that vision of a fair, color-blind society can be trusted.

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.

Our society has an inherent challenge: Many of its settings still have features that reflect our identity-stratified history and organization. Our schools, workplaces, churches, classrooms, civic organizations, and boardrooms have features that can make it harder for some identities to trust that they are a part of the “we” in the setting. Identity-blindness implies that, along with identity itself, these features don’t matter much— they can, or should, be ignored. But they do matter— to all of us. Think of being the “only one” or “one of only a few” in any important setting— as my hands reminded me, for example: one of only a few whites in a Black History seminar, one of only a few Blacks in a symphony orchestra, or one of only a few women in an advanced math course on Riemann surfaces. But there’s good news: as the Stephens experiment and the 3M company show, when these features are addressed, improvements can happen, sometimes without much effort or cost.