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.

Could this be an additional strategy for integrating our society’s organizations and institutions? Give people the red buttons they need to reduce ambiguity about how to cope in the institution. Give them an understanding of the institution and its infrastructure. Give them the social and cultural capital needed to understand the value of the experience. Give them tools and resources. Show them pathways forward. It can seem like an unusual approach to integration or diversity. But remember, it’s ambiguity over how to cope in important settings that virtually forces people facing identity threat to “remember,” to worry that bias is a source of their frustration and discomfort. For them, it’s an unavoidable part of trying to figure out what’s wrong, what’s not working in a setting.

Suppose an entire institution took this approach. What if a university, for example, tried to do for its students what Pat Neal did for me? Would it— by giving students red buttons and reducing toxic ambiguities— improve student outcomes?

There is, of course, another pedagogical mindset in graduate education: Give students the freedom to find what they care about, a true passion that will sustain them as their careers unfold. In this mindset, it’s reasonable to rid programs of as much structure as possible to allow students’ own talents, ingenuity, and interests to guide their development. This approach has produced generations of distinguished scientists and scholars. But it may not work as well for a diverse student body. The ambiguities it allows into the training experience may impose a special burden on students whose identities put their belongingness under suspicion. The open-ended freedom assumed to foster development could leave them in near-constant churn.

It’s important to stress that the UC Berkley College of Chemistry, like GSU, used multiple practices to reduce ambiguity and give support in the setting. Multiple red buttons. Any one practice alone might not be enough. Take procedural justice— the degree to which a community adheres to nondiscriminatory, transparent practices in matter of hiring, promotion, and adjudicating disputes.

They haven’t dropped the practice of giving grades, or jettisoned the lecture format, or lessened their commitment to research excellence. They haven’t restricted their commitment to a narrow sector of the population. Rather, they’ve added capacities that detect and meet the developmental needs of all students, including the less resourced and identity-threatened. They don’t lean back, presuming to select students who have what it takes to succeed in their institution. They lean in; take responsibility for developing students’ abilities and talents. And following this developmental approach they’ve built solid foundations of institutional trust that greatly facilitate student success.

• To the extent possible, it’s good for this help to be made available to everyone in the setting— as at Georgia State and UC Berkley Chemistry. Offering help to just some groups— as we’ve learned from decades of trying this through various forms of remediation— can wind up stigmatizing those groups and worsening the stereotype threat and churn they experience.