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- [00:00]
A
Yeah, that's bullshit advice. I think everybody know. Well, I don't know. I think people with very good intentions, I want to assume might have given that advice. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
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B
Especially in the last years, a lot of social situations in the United States and to some extent beyond have felt like they have very high stakes. Some people who come from minority communities might feel worried that some kind of interaction may constitute racism, that if somebody is treating them rudely in a customer service interaction, they may not just be having a bad day, they may actually be prejudiced towards them. Members of majority communities have often had reason to worry that one misplaced word, one joke that doesn't quite land, may, even if it was perfectly innocuous and it wasn't meant with any kind of animus, get him accused of somehow having prejudiced attitudes. Well, according to my guest this week, this has led to something he calls churn, to a sense of being on your guard, of being worried in situations in which you're dealing with people from other groups. That actually is really counterproductive, but often is motivated by the best of intentions, but really makes it harder for us to actually build a diverse society that can work and function well. Claude Steele is a distinguished psychologist who is a professor of psychology emeritus at Stanford University, and he is the author of the Tension that Divides Us and How to Overcome It. In this conversation we talked about whether people really feel that much churn today, whether the experience of being in very diverse environments isn't, especially for young Americans, just part of daily life anyway, about what actually causes that churn, whether perhaps some of the anti racist literature and some of the anti racist norms of the last years have ironically aggravated it in various ways. And in the last part of the conversation we talk about how to actually improve the background conditions that can inspire trust and allow us to live better with each other. To listen to that last part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support the work we do here. Please go to writingtodashamook.com listen and set up your premium podcast feed. Claude Steele, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:44]
A
My great pleasure to be here. Been looking forward to it.
- [02:47]
B
So in your last book, you suggest something that is somewhat surprising for a scholar who is focused on other things about social justice and making progress in relationship that white and black people in other ethnicities within the United States have historically had. And that is that environments of of diversity where people, particularly from different races but also from different kinds of identity groups, really have to deal with each other in A concerted way in workspaces or perhaps in college campuses can often produce this feeling of unease and stress which you call churn. What do you mean by that? Why should we be focusing on that negative aspect, what seems at first like a negative aspect of diversity?
- [03:36]
A
Yeah, I guess I'm certainly a diversity advocate. Does that sound right these times? I don't know. In America that could be a loaded statement. But I've been fascinated by this for much of my career, and it comes from observations of a personal sort and findings that grow out of the research literature and social psychology that when we're in a diverse setting, we can feel a certain apprehension about how our identities will be judged and treated there. When we're in a sort of homogeneous group and we all share an identity, it can be relaxed. We're not worried about being seen in terms of negative stereotypes about that identity. We know everybody else there is roughly the same, has roughly the same identity. So we're probably not likely to be stereotyped based on that identity. But when we're in a diverse setting, that security can go away, can erode, and we can worry a bit, sometimes quite seriously, will somebody of my type, my identity be treated fairly here, seen fairly? Will people invest in my development in this setting? Will they want to be associated with me?
- [04:56]
B
So that's a really interesting concept, and I want to kind of fillet it a little bit. Perhaps we can start by thinking about how prevalent it really is, then think about why it is that people feel that so strongly, what the best explanation for that is, which is, I think, going to then inform our discussion what to do about it, then finally turn to what the right solutions to it might be. I mean, to start off with, doesn't the idea that it is so uncomfortable to be in this diverse setting, in part because we're just not used to that, presume a kind of background vision of a society that doesn't really exist anymore for most people. You go back to the 1950s and 1960s, and it certainly was the case that the huge majority of schools in the United States was predominantly white or predominantly or exclusively black. And perhaps there was a few Asian Americans in your high school if you were in San Francisco, or a few Puerto Ricans in your school if you were in New York. But. But by and large, you really did grow up in this very homogeneous environment that then perhaps didn't experience that kind of struggle at that point. If for the first time in your life, you then joined a corporation in the 70s or 80s that actually had Some amount of real diversity, like, oh, my God, I'm not used to this. Today, there's obviously still quite a lot of housing segregation in the United States, some very deep problems. But for the vast majority of Americans who are 15 years old, they now go to high schools that actually are pretty diverse, that probably have representatives of just about every racial group very differently in different parts of the countries. I mean, probably predominantly white in North Dakota, probably very heavily Asian in San Francisco, probably with a lot of black kids in Atlanta. But with the exception of a number of schools that still continue to be predominantly black and which obviously are a result of a deep history of racial injustice and present a real problem, the sort of median experience for young people in America today, I think, is to actually grow up in environments where from preschool through middle and high school to college, they sort of always been in these diverse environments.
- [07:13]
A
Well, you know, our schools are still as racially segregated today as they were in 1954 when the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in our schools. So as an outgrowth of segregated housing and segregated communities, the schools in them tend to be predominantly of the ethnicity or the race of the community. And so there still is a considerable. I hate to use the word segregation because that has so much baggage tied to it, and it sounds like it's an. And intentional discrimination, but this is still an outgrowth of how our society has been organized around race. I think maybe that's the better term to use is that historically, those. Even though the legal basis of segregation has been done away with for the most part in the legislation of the 60s and the like, what's lingered is the degree to which our communities are still substantially organized around racial identity. So there is still that there. But I think you're correct that in many schools, they're much less segregated. In some schools, they're less segregated than they used to be, even though, as I just pointed out, they still are. When you look at the whole picture of American society, we have as much racial segregation in our schooling today as we did then. It pains me to acknowledge that fact, but it's a fact. So when we come together in colleges, let's say in the workplace, let's say in the military, in other aspects of life, we're still aware of those identities, and there are still stereotypes out there about those identities that could come into play. And I don't know for sure that I'm going to be seen, let's say, as a person integrating one of these situations. I don't know for sure that I'm Going to be seen in terms of the negative stereotypes about my identity. But I'm not sure I won't be. And if the situation is important, it can be quite impactful, a quite impactful experience. I begin the book with an example of a parent teacher conference in a junior high school in the United States that might be something to put on the table as a way of illustrating this. The student is a young African American seventh grader, and his parents are preparing to go to a conference with his teacher about his progress and the like. And the teacher is white. So the parents and student are African American, the teacher is white. Now that's inherently a diverse interaction. As the parents get into their car to go over to this conference, they're saying, well, what kind of teacher is this? They know how their student in American society could be seen that maybe the school wouldn't be as set to see him as having as promising a building as some other students. Maybe they would see him as having some aggressive tendencies. They'd interpret some things as indications of that. And so they want very much to have their child not seen in terms of these stereotypes. And this is their occasion to do that, to at least help the school and the teacher not see their child that way. So this is an important setting, and so they go into it with some tension. They go into it with churn, with this kind of vigilance. They don't know for sure that their child would be seen that way, but they know he could be.
- [11:00]
B
So I hear this claim that American schools are as segregated today as the 1950s and 1960s a lot. But my understanding is that that is based on one very specific way of calculating segregation, which actually goes up mechanically as the share of white students and the overall population goes down. And by any metric that actually captures the changing racial dynamics, I think it's very, very clear that that is not the case. So in the 1950s and 1960s, a clear majority of black students would have been in schools that were 90 plus percent black. That was the nature of segregation, right? Today that number is actually down to 17%. Only 17% of black students today go to a school that is 90 plus percent black. The same is true vice versa, about white students. Clearly, in the 1950s, 1960s, America was a predominantly white society. 85 plus percent of the American population at the time was white. And so it's true mechanically that most white students went to schools that were overwhelmingly white. But it was also obviously even more true because of the prevalence of, you know, explicit, straight up segregation today. The Number of white students that attends a school where 90 plus percent of a student body is white is actually down to 26%. So 3/4 of white students have at least a significant portion of non white students in the class from the get go. So, you know, can we really say that schools today are segregated as they were in the 1950s and 1960s?
- [12:39]
A
Well, if you adjust that percentage from 90 down to 80, you get a different picture of things. Or if you adjust it down to 70, you get a further different picture of things. I wouldn't want to get too distracted in this conversation over that. I'm willing to concede. I think the heart of your point that indeed African American students and white students have in schools much more exposure to each other than they did in that earlier era. Even though numerically there still is a, you know, schools still are predominantly one group or another group, that feature of American schools still holds. Even though, you know, it depends on if it's going to be 90%. Well, that's. Yeah, then segregation, there's been a big inroad. But if it's going to be 80%, if it's going to be 70% of their group, there are a lot of schools like that. And so I think that's one way of thinking about that. But I think the larger point that this argument stresses is that there are nonetheless stereotypes about each group that are in play and that come into play in integrated situations like that. So that African American students, they know the stereotypes about their groups and their groups abilities they see every fall. There's probably newspaper articles in their community that talk about the racial achievement gap and the like. That's sort of openly debated throughout society. White students know how they could be seen as racist and they, in interaction with a black students are gonna feel some threat of possibly being seen that way. And that's the tension that I'm trying to get at. To finish that story about the parent teacher conference, I described the tension that the parents might feel. But there's also an equally, in that instance, powerful form of identity threat that the teacher's gonna feel because she knows that she could be seen in terms of negative stereotypes about her identity as a white person. She feels she's really committed to her students and maybe especially sensitive to the needs of minority students and the like. But she knows that if she says something even slightly negative, she could be seen. She doesn't know that she will be, but she could be seen as racist and something she would hate. And it's that tension that worry about in an integrated situation that you're gonna be seen in terms of. That you could be seen in terms of some of the worst, worst stereotypes of your group, and that your work, your promise, your abilities can be seen in terms of those stereotypes. You don't know. And that is the reaction to that. The psychological tension to that is what I mean by Churn. Another way of putting it is that it is a tension that a person has between remembering and forgetting. When I come into a diverse situation, do I remember how my group has been seen and continues to be seen to some degree in the larger society and use that memory to experience, to interpret what's happening to me in that setting? Or do I just forget that and trust that I won't be seen that way, that I'll be seen fairly? That's the tension. That's the tension. That's the heart of the matter. And that's what I'm saying at bottom line, the whole central point of the book is that that particular tension makes it difficult for us to just automatically trust each other, to just relax. And. No, I don't have to worry about that here.
- [16:33]
B
Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I guess the reason why I think the two questions are related is that it's important to think about what the baseline is. And I think you may agree with that, that in some of these conversations, there's a baseline of when you come to college, you're going to have all of these black kids who've only ever been around black kids, and all these white kids have only been around white kids, and they're totally unfamiliar with each other. And how do we facilitate an environment where these alien species are going to be able to talk to each other? And I worry that that misunderstands both the actual situation where these students come from and could then lead to messaging that's actually not very conducive to solving the real sources of churn. So perhaps that allows us to go into those different accounts of what is driving Churn. And you've sort of, in the conversation so far, I think, implied two slightly different views of what might cause it. And they can be complementary and they can be dominant among different groups. Right. So one is perhaps the fear about how am I going to be perceived? Particularly when you come from a community that's historically been marginalized. You might think, are my classmates going to have negative stereotypes about me just because I come from this or that ethnic group? The other is perhaps the one that might be more on the minds of people who are in Some ways seen as being dominant or privileged or whatever word you want to use, which is, I'd love to hang out with my classmates from these other backgrounds. But I worry that perhaps if I somehow say the wrong word or make the wrong joke, even though I'm very well meaning, I'm not trying to be mean or controversial or anything like that, if somehow I put myself in an infelicitous way, perhaps somebody's gonna accuse me of being terrible and prejudiced and sort of socially ostracize me. Do you think those are at play at the same time for different groups? Is one of these more important than the other? How should we think about. Are we missing other kind of sources of churn? Why does this kind of churn arise?
- [18:35]
A
It's a general phenomenon to worry about, to some degree, about how other people, especially important other people, and especially in important situations, to worry about how they might judge us and whether something about us is going to disadvantage us in some way or another. That's the heart of churn. And what I'm arguing is that when you bring people of different backgrounds together, the examples in the book have all kinds of different identities being brought together. You can worry that in a diverse setting like that, you might be seen in terms of the negative stereotypes about your group. So the black parents, they could worry about that. And the white teacher, she's got a version of that, too. But churn is the experience, actually, that is common to the two groups. It has different sources. It's originating from different stereotypes about the two groups. But actually, both groups are experiencing this tension when they come together. Both of them are worried about whether they're going to be seen in terms of their racial identity and disadvantaged, unfairly treated unfairly because of it. They don't know that they will be, but they know that they could be. And so churn is an attempt to say, look, both sides of this thing have the same emotion. And actually, my churn can help me understand your churn that you're in that situation. And this gives us. This opens up a new road to how to make diverse situations work more effectively. At base, what it does, this churn, it's about not being able to trust the situation. When I'm in a more homogeneous group, when I'm in the white teacher's lounge, and most of the teachers, I trust that they're not gonna see me as a racist because they've got the same identity I do. But a diversity problematizes.
- [20:26]
B
I'm not sure about that, by the way, I Mean, if you think that some of the places in which the most absurd stories of cancellation and so on played out in 2020, 20, it often was very left leaning, homogeneous environments. I mean, one of the strange things about American life today is that generally speaking, FELLOW Workers at McDonald's, which tend to be very diverse, tend to get along pretty well with each other. Whereas often very progressive NGOs that are predominantly white and college educated end up having huge meltdowns over allegations of racism and so on. So it's not actually clear to me that the fear of being cold, the fear of being uncharitably interpreted and being cold, racist, it's not clear to me that that is actually monotonically increasing with the diversity of your environment. I think often in genuinely diverse environments, people are far more familiar with each other and have far less formal ways of dealing with each other and have far higher trust with each other than in environments that have a mixture of actually quite a lot of homogeneity racially, but also socioeconomically and ideologically and where perhaps sort of an invented or exaggerated accusation like that can fly a lot better than an environment where people have sort of real shit to deal with.
- [21:54]
A
Well, I'd agree with you. I mean, I think you can feel churn in that context too. It doesn't always originate in the same way. But if I happen to know I'm in a group, let's say I'm the white teacher and everybody in that teacher's lounge I know has certain tendencies to cancel people or very progressive ideas about that. And my ideas are a little different. I'm going to be in pretty intense churn. There's. It isn't a racial diversity, but it's perhaps an ideological diversity. And I'm going to be. That is quite the same kind of thing. I'm in that setting worried about how I'm going to be judged and whether I can't trust it. I feel very uncomfortable there and I can't function in relation to it. And I may react quite defensively or, or problematically. So I think if we think of the construct, the experience of churn, we shouldn't think of it as only true, as only happening between certain groups or between certain identities. It's something that can happen within groups too. Somebody announces, I can't tolerate anybody saying X or Y or Z. Yet I believe X or Y or Z. I'm going to feel that tension. I'm trying to sort of point to what I think is a relatively common kind of tension in diverse settings. It Never happens in another. In, as you say, a more homogeneous setting. It certainly can. But I think when you go up, up to 20,000ft and you look at society, I'm a man of a certain age. I can feel it when I'm talking in the morning in my coffee shop with other men of my age. I feel pretty secure about not being seen in terms of ages, stereotypes, because we're all old, and so we may be, I think, maybe a delusion, but I feel less vulnerable to those stereotypes in that kind of group. But if somebody young joins the group, I may have great affection for them, but I may also worry to some degree that I'm more vulnerable to ageist stereotypes, that my attitudes are a little antiquated, that my grasp of technology is inadequate. That's the phenomenon I'm talking about, that as we integrate across these identities, we bring in this. This tension to some degree. And it's not something that if we're on the subway and it's a very diverse. It's not an important situation, we don't care. It doesn't bother us. But when it's in a workplace or in a place that affects my future, an academic setting or something of that sort, that tension can be distracting and it can interfere with people's performance in the immediate situation. And it can even make me feel uncomfortable enough that I wouldn't want to have a career in that area. I can give you some examples of that from the research literature.
- [25:11]
B
Yeah. I want to understand some other elements of this first. So if there's kind of two principal routes to churn. One is that you're worried about your group being negatively stereotyped, and another is that you're worried that perhaps people might accuse you of having the wrong attitudes or something like that. Perhaps we can dive into each of them in a little bit more detail and understand them now. You know, I had an experience about a year ago that I thought was really interesting. I went into usps, a postal office in a rural area. And the lady who was walking there, who was white, was just extremely hostile. I mean, off the bat for no good reason. And, you know, perhaps actually that was due to my identity in some kind of way. Right. Perhaps she's prejudiced against people with beards or against people of European accents or something like that. But since I'm white and she's white, I assumed that. It's just that she was a very unpleasant person. She was having a very bad day. She hated her job. I didn't make it about myself, and I Realized in that situation, that in the. In some ways that is. And I don't love to use that word in general, but I think in this particular context, it makes sense that there was a form of privilege in that situation. That if I had gone into that coffee shop and I was Latino or I was black or some other group where you might have reasonable suspicion that some people in society are going to be prejudiced against you, I would have most likely concluded that this woman was a racist because she was so unreasonably aggressive off the bat, where it's like, what on earth could bring this on? It's so irrational. It's gotta be that right now, in fact, I presume that she treats her. Right. Exactly. Now, I presume that she treats the black people walk into our post office just as badly as she treated me. And I presume that they very reasonably come to a conclusion that they've been not just the victim of a dysfunctional company, but the victim of racism in this instance. Right. So I guess.
- [27:22]
A
Let me interrupt you there. Let me interrupt you, if I can. They probably start to worry that they're dealing with somebody. I'm not sure they're convinced yet that the person is racist, but they start to worry. And that's what she said.
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B
Well, you didn't meet how extreme that woman was, but. No, I agree with you.
- [27:42]
A
She could have. I suppose it's possible. But I think of myself, and you're often in those situations where they're ambiguous and yet important, and so they push you into churn. That's what I want this term to try to capture is the way you felt about it. I'm not sure it requires. I guess the reason I interrupted you. I'm not sure it requires actually believing that she is racist for sure, but it's certainly possible. And that possibility is what I'm concerned about.
- [28:15]
B
No, I agree. And I think in that situation, her treatment was so kind of extreme that a lot of reasonable people would have concluded with some amount of certainty that it's racism. I think a lot of people, the most thoughtful people, would have thought, well, perhaps she's just having a really bad day. But kind of bizarre, Right? And it would be natural to worry. I guess what I'm trying to get at is what is your advice to individuals, but also what is your advice to. To institutions for how to deal with that? Right. So this is one of the sources of churn. Right. Sometimes in life you can have unpleasant experiences, and if you're a member of a minority group, then you Often won't know what the source of that is. And I think that there's two kinds of attitudes you can have towards that, and both can have downsides. One attitude is to say, well, she didn't call me a racial slur. Right. I'm just going to assume she's having a bad day. I'm going to assume that it's nothing to do with race. And perhaps that is empowering in a certain kind of way. But it also raises the risk that you're systematically misdiagnosing situations, giving people a pass when you shouldn't be, that you're naive about some of the challenges you face in society. Some downsides to that, on the other hand, you might say, and arguably our culture veered towards that in the last few years. Well, every time that you have that kind of experience, experience, you must assume that that is white supremacy at play. Because given everything about American history, that is the most natural explanation. And so you should jump to that conclusion. Right. And that obviously also has downsides because, you know, it's much less damaging to your self perception, to your ease in moving in society, to think as I do. Well, that woman was weird. I don't know what she was on about than to think, oh, I had this, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor but real and hurtful racial injustice that just happened to me. So you don't want to jump to that wrong conclusion because that might be damaging for you. So how should people maneuver between those poles? And how should institutions signal to people when people come into college? There's all kinds of administrative programming about all kinds of things. You can probably send a message from an institution to some extent that influences how people are predisposed to approach a situation like that. If you are welcoming a freshman class to Stanford, what would you tell them about how they should feel in a situation like that? How should they try and make sense of it?
- [30:43]
A
Yes, the whole book tries to pick up exactly those kind of questions. How do you reduce it at the level. How do you manage it and reduce it at the level of individuals? How would you do it in a larger setting like a classroom or a workplace? How to hold institutions function in ways that reduce, churn and build trust? And I think this is the thing that sort of excited me about this line of thinking and the evidence that I could find in its behalf is that it points to a new road, a new way of thinking about diverse settings, and that the new way is not so much to worry, that everything has to do with prejudice. Again, I always Point out, I'm not trying to diminish the importance of human prejudice and human affairs. It's very profoundly important. But this is something else. It's attention I'm trying to bring to people's attention. In addition to that, it is a question that I just can't quite trust the situation. I can't quite trust you. You couldn't quite trust this woman. She gave you enough cues there as to raise the possibility that she was going to be biased against you. You didn't know that she would be. You don't have to conclude for sure that she's a racist or something in order to worry, but that the way forward has to recognize that in diverse settings, perhaps the chief goal is building trust. Trust building, trust building. That's the heart of the case. That's the heart of the argument here, is that this is a dimension of intergroup relations that we just haven't understood and recognize the importance of. It's not so much about me worrying about changing your prejudice or you worrying about changing mine as it is, I need to know I can trust you, that you're going to see my full humanity and my full potential, not have that obscured by stereotypes about my identity or anything. I need to trust that you're going to see me. Now, this is where some examples I think are especially helpful in maybe the audience getting a concrete image of what I'm talking about here. Jeff Cohen and Lee Ross and I, some years ago did an experiment where we ask a question like that, how does a white professor give critical feedback to a black student and have that feedback be trusted? And so we brought in Stanford students, white and black, and we had them write an essay about their favorite teacher. And we told them if the teacher, if the essay was good, then we might publish it in a new magazine. We were starting on campus, on teaching, so they should put their best foot forward, come back in two days and they would get feedback on that essay. And that was our question. How much did they trust that feedback? And what we varied is how we gave the feedback. Looking for a way to establish trust of the sort that I'm talking about. So what we found, so what kind
- [33:58]
B
of feedback worked and what kind of feedback didn't work?
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A
Yes, that was very interesting. In the first two conditions of the experiment, we gave the feedback straightforwardly, like, read your essay, here's the feedback. And in the other condition we said something really nice about them. Sort of an ad hominem compliment. You bring great energy to my class. And, and here's the Feedback? Well, interestingly, and this is sort of at the heart of the whole argument, White students trusted that they're not in that situation under a group stereotype in that society about their abilities, and maybe their abilities not being adequate, they're not under that stereotype. Black students, however, are under that stereotype in American society. And so reflecting that they didn't trust the feedback, and it's pretty dramatic finding because these are very talented students. They're Stanford students. Why wouldn't they trust the feedback? Well, when you think about it, there's an ambiguity for them. They don't know whether the feedback is coming from their essay or whether it's coming from the feedback giver's opinions of their group's abilities.
- [35:13]
B
And that was true when the comments at the beginning were positive. Right. So it's obviously, if you made negative comments about somebody's, it doesn't seem like you're trying very hard and you seem like an unpleasant person. That obviously wouldn't work very well. But here you're talking about you being such a great personality in my class, and you're so wonderful, and having praised you and praised you, here's my feedback. And then the students say, look, this feels like this teacher is not being sincere. The kind of. I mean, it's kind of like, is it that they then feel that they're just being perceived in terms of their identity? Is it that they feel like this teacher's not going to be straight with them because they somehow feel like.
- [35:52]
A
Yeah, that they can't quite trust the feedback because they don't know whether it's coming from the real work they did or from maybe the feedback giver just has this opinion about my group's abilities and what's going on here. So even if the feedback is positive, I don't really know how much I can trust it. However. All right, so importantly, that's the feedback probably most common in everyday life, but that's the feedback that didn't work. There is a form of feedback that did work, and it's very simple and it will sound very familiar in that condition. The feedback giver said, look, we use high standards in evaluating these essays because we might publish them in this new journal we're running. So we use high standards, but I've read your essay, and I think you can meet those standards. Here's the feedback. So. And when that happened, the black students trusted the feedback more than any other group of participants in the experiment. They trusted it. They were ready to trust this situation. But what they needed was Some signal that they weren't being seen in terms of negative stereotypes about their group. And he gave them those signals. He said, look, we're using high standards, and I think you can meet those standards. That's really powerful evidence right there in the moment that this feedback doesn't reflect that he thinks black students don't have the same ability or something of that sort, because if he did, he wouldn't have treated them that way. So that is a good example of where this book goes in terms of how to function in a diverse environment. What's critical that often what's critical is simple evidence that you can trust the situation. And trust is a game. I want to stress this in case I don't get it in later. It's a game that's played on the ground between people. It's who listens to you. It's who tries to figure out what is really happening to you, what your circumstances really are, and tries to help you deal with them. When somebody does that, you trust them and you don't care whether they're in your. Whether you share an identity or have a vastly different identity. And we have all had experiences like that. And that is the kind of hopefulness, that's the direction, I think, in diverse settings that we can go down which will produce a lot better outcomes than we have trying to reduce everybody's prejudices. As psychologists, we know how difficult that can be. But trust can be built between people, and it can be built very straightforwardly. And I hope that's a good example.
- [38:39]
B
It is a great example. And let me. Obviously, I'm a teacher as well, and so I reflect a lot about these issues, and I just want to draw out the implications of this or ask you to help us draw out the implications of this. So let me give you a couple of examples, right? One example is that my attitude was, and I would say remains, that I should treat every student with the same standards and the same grace and the same expectations, irrespective of the kind of identity they have. Now, that doesn't obviously mean that in an essay about their favorite teacher they might not bring in their identity in all kinds of ways. That obviously the community they're from, the experiences they've had, is obviously going to be reflected in that essay, and that's going to be one of its strengths. And that's a wonderful thing. It doesn't mean that if a student has a disability, you shouldn't make sure to accommodate that and so on, but they need to have the same performance to get An A. And I try to encourage them in the same way and I hope to communicate to them with grace that they have room for improvement when we're not doing great work, irrespective of the kind of racial background they have now. When I was starting to apply for faculty jobs, I guess around 2015, 2016, it already was the custom that we should write teaching statements or diversity statements for a lot of those jobs. And I was advised in very strong terms that anything like what I just said to you was inacceptable. That that would immediately be taken as advocating for a kind of race blindness, which is the very opposite of what you should do in the classroom. That in fact you need to use words like culturally sensitive and how you've worked with students on a particular experiences that you're going to see each student in terms of the structural challenges they face throughout their lives and so on and so forth. So do you think that the need to write these kind of statements and the particular culture about what's expected to be in those statements will actually encourage teachers systematically to give the kind of feedback that might not work, which is to start with how wonderful that you come from this vibrant, cultural Dominican background. And it is so wonderful to have this element of diversity in my class. And now let me give you feedback which sounds like exactly the kind of thing that according to your studies is going to quite understandably make the student think. Hang on a second. I don't think I'm being seen in my own personality here. I think this teacher just sees me as a representative of some kind of group or perhaps is afraid of how I'm going to judge them if they give me negative feedback. I'm not going to trust what they say to me.
- [41:35]
A
Yeah. Can we swear on this, please? Yeah. That's bullshit advice. I think everybody knows. Well, I don't know. I think people with very good intentions, I want to assume, might have given that advice. But I'm trying to point to the fact that I'm not on either side of the sort of political, progressive, conservative war on this thing. I'm trying to find something underneath this that gives us a new road forward. And that new road forward I think is accessible to all of us, which is to build trust. You don't need to. It's impossible for me to know every aspect of your culture and to fit my language into it. And it just makes me self conscious and unbelievable. But I think people. Here's another example. This comes from the work of Erving Goffman in the 50s. He did an ethnography of gay life in San Francisco. And he found that gay men had a word for straight people that they liked and could trust. And the word for it was wise in the sense of hey man, he's wise. He gets us. What they mean basically is that he's wise. He sees our full humanity despite the stereotype and the stigma that those men, especially in that era had to endure. That the people who they considered wise saw their full humanity and treated them accordingly, they could trust them. That's the kind of circumstance that I think we're shooting for here. That's the kind of advice I would have given you that you want to try to be able to see full humanity and full potential in difference. Indifference. And you want to respond accordingly. And that often is facilitated by taking a kind of learning mindset toward students and toward people of different backgrounds. To be strictly colorblind, I'm not going to see anything about your background. I'm going to ignore all that. It's hard for me to trust that because I'm not sure first that you can do that. And secondly, it's my background is important to me. I have had life experiences because of that identity. And if you're just going to sort of upfront ignore them, then I'm not sure I can trust what you say and how you behave going forward. So either way, I think that advice is just misguided. And that and an evolutionary step forward in how to handle diverse situations is to focus more on the down on the ground things that build trust. Being responsive to people, seeing their humanity, asking them what they think, asking them what they're going through, trying to understand what their experiences really are. And then to the best of your ability in this situation, trying to facilitate their development in the situation in the workplace or in the classroom, try to understand who they actually are. Much simpler that sometimes people can't appreciate it. And I'm trying to sort of underline that here. But that experiment, I think holds a real important narrative that if you just looked at the first two conditions of the experiment where the feedback was given straightforwardly, you think black students just don't give a damn that they're not motivated, that there's. Why would they mistrust these well meaning people would be your whole take on it. But as soon as you see that when the feedback giver gives them the slightest signal that they don't have to worry about being seen in terms of that ability stereotype, they're free of that they trust like crazy becomes a completely different experience for them. And I think there's even some of the points to some of the tragedy that can otherwise happen. They in those first two conditions, they're isolated from the value of the feedback. They don't trust the feedback, so they're not getting the full value out of it. And they're going through school like that. That's not just something that happens once in an experiment. It's a condition of life for them in that kind of situation. So it really stresses the importance of being wise, of building that trust and recognizing that that's what you have to do as a teacher. That's the thing to focus on. Not necessarily to repress every prejudicial thought you have, but to just treat them in a way that builds trust with them, be responsive to them, ask them what they experience and trust what they say. When you grant trust, you get trust.
- [46:43]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Claude and I talk about how we can actually inspire trust, how we can, in some of those highly charged situations, create a basis for viral cooperation, how we can go into our private associations, the kind of clubs we might be a part of, or into our place of business, and bring the kind of ideas that he's arguing for into action to listen to that part of the conversation, to support the work we do here. To no longer have to listen to these annoying appeals by me, go to writing.dashamonk.com listen and become a paying subscriber. That's writing.dashamonk.com Listen,
- [47:35]
A
Sam.