This book’s interest is to expand this approach to include a focus on mobilizing the settings of society themselves to foster successful integration. It sees these settings as having a capacity of their own, bottom-up, to foster successful integration— a capacity, perhaps underappreciated, to build trust across otherwise tenacious identity divides. It explores how to do this at several levels in society: in personal relationships and mentorships; in midsize settings like classrooms, sports teams, and small businesses; in larger institutions like universities and corporations; and in the overarching paradigms we use to design institutions like K-12 schooling.

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.

This book argues instead for a “wise” model of inclusion, as practiced at GSU and Berkley Chemistry: meeting the students or inductees where they are, with trust in their potential to develop and with a focus on giving them the red buttons— the information, know-how, resources, timely coaching, social capital, and so on— and showing them the way forward, all of which will enable them to stay in the setting and cope well. These things lower ambiguity and churn— as illustrated in Pat Neal’s effect on me, and in the effects of GSU and Berkley Chemistry’s institution-level strategies.

Could such misguidance be a root of the educational inequalities that trouble our society? Could an expanded paradigm— one that also focuses on building students’ trust in their school’s ability and willingness to invest in them— make a transformative difference?