The new tutor was different. She was relational, not gushy, but attentive. She intuitively understood you were working under the weight, the history, of a reputation— that it was “in the air,” waiting to be validated by your first frustration. She knew that any sign of a lack of confidence in your ability could send you into a churn of self-doubt and very likely kill your interest.

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.

6. Making School and Work Settings Wise

And this could happen, I also knew, without them being aware of it. I intuitively understood how stereotypes worked. They specified what was normal. My weak performance could confirm a stereotype about African Americans, while my strong performance could be taken as unusual. One’s hands, of course, should be beneath notice in such seminars. But the sight of my hands could push me into a churn of “remembering”— even without anybody present doing anything in particular to provoke it.

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.

What he needs when he gets to school is something other than cognitive accountability— its good intentions notwithstanding. He needs signals that address his churn and that help resolve it: signs from adults and fellow students, for example, that he belongs in that school, that he is valued for who he is and who he can be, and that he is seen as having the potential to succeed there. And it wouldn’t hurt if he found some things about school interesting. For example, if his homeroom teacher read the class a compelling story every morning to get the day rolling. He needs signals that despite his status— and his churn to the contrary— he can trust the school’s beneficence toward him.

Yet in his school— very likely in the grip of cognitive accountability— he isn’t likely to have such experiences. Rather (as we shall see), he’s likely to get a more basic skills curriculum not much connected to his life, needs, or interests; a rigid disciplinary system; and frequent assessments of his cognitive skills that, from his perspective, may reinforce his image as a poor student— to himself and others.