But it’s a different story when the task is difficult enough to cause frustration— when it’s at the frontier of one’s skills, so to speak. The experience of frustration gives credence to the stereotype. It tells the person: “Given your frustration, maybe the stereotype is true, and true of you,” or “Given your frustration, maybe others will see the stereotype as true, and true of you.” For people who care about doing well on the task, both ideas are upsetting, threatening. They try to forget— they try to forget the stereotype and push on.

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?

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.

The new study habits I’d learned from Pat gave me the same sense New Yorkers have about their stresses: that I knew what to do. I knew how to cope. The ambiguity lessened. My frustration lessened, and with it my sense of being under threat. A weight of race was lifted, even though Pat’s help had nothing directly to do with race.

The actor’s perspective is different. The actor— the person in the setting coping with, among other things, the possibility of being stereotyped— is not looking at himself. He’s looking out at the circumstances he’s dealing with. It’s those circumstances that stand out to him, not himself. He’s likely, then, at least in large part, to see the effects of stereotypes differently than an observer: not as an idea about his group that he comes to believe at the expense of his own confidence and life outcomes but more simply as a threat posed by other people in the setting. He sees their stereotype-driven judgments and treatment of him that could disadvantage him in important settings like school, a business situation, or a traffic stop.

So, to the question of how to build trust in diverse settings, Churn recommends taking the actor’s perspective. It’s a mindset that searches for what people in the setting are contending with, including what they are contending with because of their identities.