The new tutor was different. She was relational, not gushy, but attentive. She intuitively understood you were working under the weight, the history, of a reputation— that it was “in the air,” waiting to be validated by your first frustration. She knew that any sign of a lack of confidence in your ability could send you into a churn of self-doubt and very likely kill your interest.

It began with wiseness. She engaged you with challenge. She picked problems captured by that phrase, “at the frontier of your skills.” “Now this is level three . . . It’s going to get more difficult.” Her instruction was Socratic. She wanted you to see that your own thinking could solve problems. She corrected you by asking questions about your reasoning. She inoculated you against frustration. She made it seem normal: “Now, this may be a little harder since it has been a minute since we have done that type of problem.” Her praise was largely indirect— “we’re ready for the next level of work”— or she reminded you of how hard the problem you solved was— with just a note of being impressed. She diminished your failures; “I think I didn’t tell you what I wanted.” She used questions to stimulate your curiosity; “OK, can you think of yet another way to solve the problem?” Her questions focused on you solving the small parts of math problems that enabled you to solve whole problems. She avoided any focus on the question of your math ability. She gave no direct praise or criticism of your performance or ability. She used no incentives. She simply led you, in tiny increments, to see your math potential for yourself. You accumulated successes. You became more engaged, more curious, more confident. You began to feel like you could do these problems— your math identity notwithstanding.

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.

6. Making School and Work Settings Wise

And this could happen, I also knew, without them being aware of it. I intuitively understood how stereotypes worked. They specified what was normal. My weak performance could confirm a stereotype about African Americans, while my strong performance could be taken as unusual. One’s hands, of course, should be beneath notice in such seminars. But the sight of my hands could push me into a churn of “remembering”— even without anybody present doing anything in particular to provoke it.

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.