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.

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.

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?

So, the cognitive-accountability paradigm may keep out of view, or at least in dim view, something very important to the academic achievement of students like Tyler— the social-psychological dimension of his school experience, including that tied to his identity. The cognitive-accountability paradigm is essentially identity-blind. It knows that this aspect of a student’s experience can affect school achievement— for example, that it can be helpful when student experience is shaped by a middle-class background and less so when it is shaped by a lower income background.

Looked at from the standpoint of cognitive accountability, these strategies— socio-emotional learning strategies or strategies reducing the identity threat many students can experience in school— can seem beside the point, of marginal importance, not rooted in cognitive principles of learning. But looked at from the standpoint of building students’ trust in their schooling and their identification with it, they have a clear unity: They all address Tyler’s primary need to trust, care about, and engage with school. The good news here is that from an expanded paradigm— the identification paradigm— falls a much-expanded set of fixes.