The larger point is that the effort to foster trust in diverse settingsā a university, a small business, a sixth-grade classroom, a new start-up, a medical office, a magazineā is likely to be incomplete without seeing, without, as much as possible, walking in the shoes of the people involved.
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But Black students have lived with their racial identity. They know it can matter. They didnāt 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 theyād miss out on that benefit. And this would happen over and over in a diverse school.
Leaving out trust instigated by the less empowered would miss how behaving out of trustā with faith in other peopleās capacity for fairnessā can be its own source of power, even when, or especially when, it comes from people lower in the social order.
Second, these efforts should involve the participation of as many people as possible. When people feel they havenāt been heard they tend not to trust. But when their input is a regular, normalized part of how a setting functions, theyāre better able to trust it even when they disagree.
Mississippi was seeing. He put it simply: āif you really want to do something with somebody else, really want to work with that person, the first thing you have to do is make a personal connection. You have to find out who it is you are working with.ā
I think of seeing as the most important component of trust-building.
For trust to build in a setting, it must be clear that the more powerfully situated are invested in it. It is they who will have the authority to make organizational room for a trust-building connection.
In seeing, each party must accept the importance of making a personal connection with the otherā must understand, as Robert Moses did in Mississippi, that they should go talk to each other. They should get a sense of what the others are like; how they see their roles (as teacher or parents, for example); what their intentions, hopes, and concerns are; what conditions and circumstances they are contending with; what their needs are. This getting-to-know-you effort is worth a lot. It conveys respect. And it helps the parties understand each otherās needsā for example, in the parent-teacher conference itself, and in going forward as teacher and mentors. It tells each party what would be helpful to the others and it gives both parties some assurance that they are reasonably well understood.