5. Trust in the Face of Power

As I worked on the ideas in Churn, I felt certain things were becoming clear: that trust was indeed a critical ingredient of successful diversity in many of the everyday settings and relationships of our lives; that wiseness— seeing full humanity in human difference— was a mindset for winning trust between people of otherwise wary identities; that giving people the opportunity to tell you about their values, their needs, and their own agendas amounted to wiseness and was a usable strategy; that when giving feedback across identity divides, it was especially important to convey faith in the other party’s potential; and that follow-through, giving real help in achieving these things, was just as essential.

It wasn’t that I believed these things, even if implemented all together, would always and definitely eliminate diversity tension. Rather, my growing conviction was that they could reduce these tensions— provide traction against them— in our relationships and everyday settings and thus expand the approaches we had to address this central American challenge.

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.

In answer to the question “Is wiseness— offering trust to beget trust— for everyone?”: I’m afraid it’s too much to expect from the less powerfully situated in a diverse setting, especially early on. It simply makes them too vulnerable. And it could well seem impossible. In describing what he saw as President Barack Obama’s exceptional ability to offer trust to the American public, including white Americans, the African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “The vast majority of us [African Americans] are, necessarily, too crippled by our defences to ever consider such a proposition.

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.

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.