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.

In a third condition, the feedback-giver said to each participant that he was using high standards in evaluating their work and that, having looked at their essay, he believed that they had the potential to meet those standards. This signalled to the Black participants that they weren’t being stereotyped. If they were, they wouldn’t be held to high standards or have their potential affirmed. This feedback was water on parched land for Black participants. They trusted it as much as white students did. And trusting it, they used it to improve their essays. Three times more of them took their essays home to improve than did participants in any other condition of the experiment.

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?

They were left with that nagging ambiguity: Was it my essay or a bias of the feedback-giver that shaped the feedback? In these two conditions, Black students wanted to trust the feedback, be motivated by it. But there was that ambiguity. They remained in churn, protectively less engaged. Take this ambiguity away— as did the wise feedback-giver— and Black students showed strong trust and motivation. Their capacity to trust and be motivated was there all along. The spark they needed was evidence that the feedback-giver’s expectation of them was not limited by the stereotype about their group’s abilities.

7. Making Institutions Wise

“What does it take to succeed here?” I was genuinely confused— in a cloud of ambiguity. And, as one of only eight African Americans in a student body of nine hundred or so at the time, that ambiguity had a certain toxicity: Like Mirna on the trail, I worried that how people saw my race could affect how they saw and treated me. I couldn’t rule out that possibility. I was knee-deep in churn.