Again, no predicament. So it’s not the stereotype per se that impairs their performance. It’s the stereotype plus who they are, what’s important to them, the stiffness of the challenge they face, and whether they are in a setting that is diverse enough that the stereotype could be in play. It’s these elements together that make a performance-impairing predicament.

There is poignancy to stereotype threat: It’s felt most by those in the stereotyped group who are most identified with achieving in the area where the stereotype applies, and who are trying to do challenging or frustrating things in that area. It affects most the vanguard of the group— as in Mirna wanting to succeed as an ultrarunner; as in women trying to break glass ceilings in finance; as in highly invested African American law students taking challenging state bar exams; as in white American males trying to succeed in elite basketball. That’s when, in the heat of frustration, the stereotype’s dark message— “everybody knows that, because of who you are, you probably can't do well at this, and that you probably don’t belong”— becomes personally relevant. That’s when it can cause enough churn to interfere with performance.

The common presumption is that biases like racism, sexism, and homophobia are the chief corrosives of diversity. And the are bad, to be sure. What I’m arguing is that churn is a further corrosive— in many common situations, as corrosive as prejudices themselves. Is the white teacher avoiding a needed conversation with Black parents because she is prejudiced, or because she is worried that a misstep in the conversation could get her seen as racist? Is it prejudice? Or is it churn that makes her hesitate? The point is that reducing churn can sometimes be as important in diverse setting as reducing prejudice itself.

Admittedly, this idea asks for an expansion of our thinking.

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?

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.