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.

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.

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.

Second, these efforts should involve the participation of as many people as possible. When people feel they haven’t been heard they tend not to trust. But when their input is a regular, normalized part of how a setting functions, they’re better able to trust it even when they disagree.

Lerner argued as follows: To feel comfortable in the world, we need to believe the world is basically just— that generally people get what they deserve. Thus when we see a person suffering for little reason, it upsets us by implying that maybe the world isn’t just. And to restore that injured image, we might actually derogate such a victim— blame them for their suffering— as a way of restoring our needed belief that the world is just, and that people do in fact get what they deserve.

In one of the most surprising findings in the history of social psychology, this is just what happened. Subjects derogated the victim, downgrading her personality and character.