At base, Churn is a practical book. It focuses less on the nature or politics of identity and more on what it takes to build trust between people of different identities— even oppositional identities— in the real-life settings of our lives. It spotlights a dimension of human relations— trust-building— that may be even more powerful than we thought.

This book’s interest is to expand this approach to include a focus on mobilizing the settings of society themselves to foster successful integration. It sees these settings as having a capacity of their own, bottom-up, to foster successful integration— a capacity, perhaps underappreciated, to build trust across otherwise tenacious identity divides. It explores how to do this at several levels in society: in personal relationships and mentorships; in midsize settings like classrooms, sports teams, and small businesses; in larger institutions like universities and corporations; and in the overarching paradigms we use to design institutions like K-12 schooling.

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?

Power and status differences then, can frustrate trust building in a setting. And wiseness can counter that frustration. But for that to happen, it’s best that wiseness come first from the top. It’s too much to expect the vulnerable to risk further vulnerability by trusting first. (Though this can happen, as we shall shortly see.) Once leadership offers trust, like the wise feedback-giver in the Cohen experiment, it becomes a path the vulnerable can follow. So, the advice offered here is that in diverse settings— be it an interaction between a doctor and her patient, a lawyer and her client, a teacher as his students, an institution and its constituents, a business and its customers— the more empowered identity should lead with trust.

Can this approach be formed into a usable strategy for building foundational trust and lowering churn in diverse settings? I believe so, and propose a strategy with three goals: seeing, welcoming, and supporting.