And yet, since dignity - understood as recognition - is something that must be conferred, two other assumptions about the human condition must be made: first, homo sapiens are inclined in some respect to regard one another as equals; and second, they cannot live optimally without having some form of relationship with each other. Indeed, both these ideals - that we are an egalitarian and social species - have become so commonplace in many parts of the world as to sound like hackneyed New Age notions.

Valuing the differences is the essence of synergy—the mental, the emotional, the psychological differences between people. And the key to valuing those differences is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are. If I think I see the world as it is, why would I want to value the differences? Why would I even want to bother with someone who’s “off track”? My paradigm is that I am objective; I see the world as it is. Everyone else is buried by the minutia, but I see the larger picture. That’s why they call me a supervisor—I have super vision. If that’s my paradigm, then I will never be effectively interdependent, or even effectively independent, for that matter. I will be limited by the paradigms of my own conditioning. The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality. When we’re left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data. Is it logical that two people can disagree and that both can be right? It’s not logical: it’s psychological. And it’s very real. You see the young lady; I see the old woman. We’re both looking at the same picture, and both of us are right. We see the same black lines, the same white spaces. But we interpret them differently because we’ve been conditioned to interpret them differently.

Wiseness can be as simple as seeing people in terms other than how they might be stereotyped— for example, inviting a qualified older person to lead discussion on new technologies. Or it could be holding a person to high standards in an area where their group is negatively stereotypes— for example, encouraging a strong female math student to take advanced physics or encouraging a talented white American basketball player to persist in elite basketball. These actions have wiseness.

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?

As a general rule, for diverse settings to be wise, it’s best for the more empowered to move first— the teacher before the students, the manager before the employees, the doctor before the patient, the parents before the children, the minister before the parishioners, the white students before the small number of minorities in a classroom, the coach before the athletes, the CEO before the rank file, the Black professor of African American history before the minority of whites in the class, the board before the organization’s administration, and so on. This isn’t to leave the less empowered off the hook. At some point, they, too must be wise— able to see full humanity in difference and put their trust in a setting. The point here—considering the identity power dynamics in a setting— is about who goes first in making wiseness a normative standard. The answer is clear: the more empowered. Most often that means the leadership.