He faced these conditions not because he was George Floyd the individual but because of where his identity located him in society— a location he had no choice but to contend with.

Believing that one’s moral responsibility begins and ends with seeing people as individuals tends to push identity contingencies like these out of view. It pushes us to see people in terms of internal characteristics, or what we imagine their internal characteristics to be. On the last day of George’s life, we just see a large, middle aged Black man in a tank top possibly trying to pass a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill in a corner bodega. We look for things about George the individual that could explain this— poor impulse control, a broader lack of executive self-control, dysfunctional cultural beliefs, deficits in employable cognitive skills. We downplay, or miss completely, the gauntlet of conditions tied to his race and class that he would have had to surmount in order to gain a secure connection to school, the economy, and society.

Similarly, there is an understanding of schools, workplaces, and public spaces of our society that we would like people to trust— that they are basically fair places that offer genuine and equal opportunity. But for people like George Floyd, and others whose families and communities have experienced identity-based disadvantages, this proposition can be difficult to trust. Saying that these places are now color-blind doesn’t help much. People remember. They know that the inequalities that stem from those disadvantages have not been remedied.

4. Be Wise, Not Color-Blind

In the 1950s, Erving Goffman, one of the leading sociologists of the last half of the twentieth century, wrote a classic book on the nature of stigmatization entitled Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. It was informed by a gay bar culture of that era in San Francisco. In that period of intense anti-gay bigotry, Goffman learned that the men of this culture had a term for straight people they trusted. The term was “wise” as in “he’s OK, he’s wise, he knows who we are, he sees us as fully human.” Miles Davis’s description of Gil Evan’s tells us that African Americans have similar terms: “he’s cool” or “he’s hip,” meaning, again, the he knows what’s up, he knows that racial stigmatization is a real predicament in the lives of African Americans, that it takes intelligence and strength of character to survive it, and that, in cases like Miles Davis’s, it can foster great art that reveals the humanity that exists behind stigmatization.

Gil Evans was hip to this. He didn’t say that he, Gil Evans, had decided to overlook Mile’s racial identity— be blind to it— and through that approach see him as fully human, as “just like everybody else.” That would be color-blindness. That would be sweeping aside as irrelevant a huge feature of Miles’s life and experience. It might be the view of a person occupying a high role in the Wilkerson play. A person who didn’t have to know the names of the people in the chorus. A person not wanting to appear prejudiced, perhaps, but not really wanting to be concerned about the experience of people in the lesser roles. What Evans saw and accepted was Miles’s actual experience and how he dealt with it. His affinity for Miles was a knowing affinity. That’s what made him “cool” despite his eating radishes out of a brown paper bag in Manhattan jazz clubs.

The rhetorical claim of color-blindness is often offered in defence of a good intention: to not discount someone’s full humanity based on their group identity. It’s an intention that I appreciate. But it unfortunately implies that one can overlook even profound parts of another person— experiences tied to their group identity— and still convincingly see them for who they are. So for the people on the receiving end, it can raise questions: If you don’t see my identity or acknowledge the conditions that go with it in this society, how can you see me for who I am? And if you don’t see me for who I am, how can I trust you?

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.

Second, ask people to identify features in a setting that imply that some identities belong there more than others, or that expectations are higher for some identities than for others.