Claude Steele is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. His latest book is Churn: The Absurd Abyss of Race in America.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Claude Steele discuss why diversity produces psychological tension even in the absence of explicit prejudice, whether American schools are truly as racially segregated today as they were in the 1950s, and how the fear of being stereotyped affects both minority and majority group members in integrated settings.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: 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 relationships that white and black people and other ethnicities within the United States have historically had. That is that environments 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, or what seems at first like a negative aspect of diversity?
Claude Steele: Yeah, I guess you could say I’m certainly a diversity advocate. Does that sound right? These days 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 in social psychology.
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 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 I—will somebody of 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?
Those kinds of concerns can arise, and the more important the setting, the more intense they’re going to be felt. It can be quite a factor in a person’s life. It can, for example, affect my decisions about what career path to follow. Will someone of my identity be comfortable following that career path? Will I be judged fairly? Will I be seen as somebody who’s promising?
It can seem a little Delphic, a little abstract, but down on the ground in everyday life—especially in the settings of our lives: schools, workplaces, doctors’ offices, lawyers’ offices, basketball teams—this kind of emotion, this kind of reaction, can be a real factor there, and sometimes it can be noxious enough that we want to avoid the setting altogether, just to feel comfortable. We don’t feel comfortable in that setting. So I wanted to draw that out and then begin to think about how to fix that. I think it’s something different from prejudice. We tend to think of the main problem with diversity as being prejudice, in the sense that if we could eliminate that entirely, maybe there’d be no problem there. But I think you can see from the logic here that it’s independent, it’s something different than prejudice. I don’t want to diminish the importance of prejudice, but this is different. It’s just a social pressure that is tied to the experience of diversity.
Mounk: 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 inform our discussion of what to do about it—then finally turn to what the right solutions to it might be.
To start off with, doesn’t the idea that it is so uncomfortable to be in this diverse setting presume, in part because we’re just not used to that, 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 were predominantly white or predominantly or exclusively black, and perhaps there were 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 by and large you really did grow up in this very homogeneous environment that then perhaps didn’t experience that kind of strength. 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—my god, I’m not used to this, right?
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 fifteen 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 country. 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 meeting 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’ve sort of always been in these diverse environments.
Steele: Well, our schools are still as racially segregated today as they were in 1954, when the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in our schools. 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. 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 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: historically, even though the legal basis of segregation has been done away with for the most part in the legislation of the ’60s, what’s lingered is the degree to which our communities are still substantially organized around racial identity.
So there is still that, but I think you’re correct that in many schools they’re much 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 is 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. 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 a quite impactful experience.
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I begin the book with an example of a parent-teacher conference in a junior high school in the United States. This involves an African American student—a young African American seventh grader—and his parents are preparing to go to a conference with his teacher about his progress. The teacher is white. So the parents and the student are African American, the teacher is white. That’s inherently a diverse interaction. As the parents get into their car to go to this conference, they’re saying, well, what kind of teacher is this? They know how their student could be seen in American society—that maybe the school wouldn’t be as set to see him as having promising abilities as some other students. Maybe they would see him as having some aggressive tendencies, and interpret some things as indications of that. So they want very much not to have their child seen in terms of these stereotypes. This is their occasion to help the school and the teacher not see their child that way. So this is an important setting, and they go into it with some tension. They go into it 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.
Mounk: I hear this claim that American schools are as segregated today as they were in 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 in the overall population goes down. By any metric that actually captures the changing racial dynamics, I think it’s very clear that that is not the case. 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. 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 and 1960s, America was a predominantly white society—85-plus percent of the American population at the time was white. 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 explicit, straight-up segregation. Today the number of white students who attend a school where 90-plus percent of the student body is white is actually down to 26%. So three-quarters of white students have at least a significant portion of non-white students in their class from the get-go. So can we really say that schools today are as segregated as they were in the 1950s and 1960s?
Steele: Well, if you adjust that percentage from ninety down to eighty, you get a different picture of things. Or if you adjust it down to seventy, 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 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 schools still are predominantly one group or another group. That feature of American schools still holds, even though it depends on if it’s going to be ninety percent—well, then the segregation, there’s been a big inroad—but if it’s going to be eighty percent, if it’s going to be seventy percent of their group, there are a lot of schools like 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. African American students know the stereotypes about their group and their group’s abilities. Every fall there’s probably newspaper articles in their community that talk about the racial achievement gap and the like—that’s openly debated throughout society. White students know how they could be seen as racist, and in interaction with black students they’re going to feel some threat of possibly being seen that way. That’s the tension I’m trying to get at.
Let me finish that story about the parent-teacher conference. I described the tension that the parents might feel, but there’s also an equally powerful form of identity threat that the teacher’s going to feel, because she knows that she could be seen in negative terms, 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, 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.
It’s that tension, that worry in an integrated situation that you’re going to be seen, that you could be seen, in terms of some of the 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. That reaction, that psychological tension, is what I mean by churn.
Another way of putting it is that it is a tension 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 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 heart of the matter. And that’s the whole central point of the book: that particular tension makes it difficult for us to just automatically trust each other, to just relax and say, no, I don’t have to worry about that here.
Mounk: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I guess the reason why I think the two questions are related is that it’s important to think about what the baseline is. I think you may agree 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 who’ve only been around white kids, and they’re totally unfamiliar with each other. 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 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. You’ve, in the conversation so far, I think, implied two slightly different views of what might cause it. They can be complementary, and they can be dominant among different groups. One is perhaps the fear about how I am 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 way 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—if somehow I put myself in an infelicitous way, perhaps somebody’s going to 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 kinds of sources of churn? Why does this kind of churn arise?
Steele: Yeah, it’s a general phenomenon to worry, to some degree, about how other people—especially important other people, and especially in important situations—might judge us, and whether something about us is going to disadvantage us in some way. That’s the heart of churn. 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. Churn is the experience that is actually 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, treated unfairly, because of it. They don’t know that they will be, but they know that they could be.
Churn is an attempt to say, look, both sides of this thing have the same emotion. Actually, my churn can help me understand your churn, that you’re in that situation. 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 going to see me as a racist, because they’ve got the same identity I do. Diversity problematizes that trust.
Mounk: I’m not sure about that, by the way. If you think about some of the places in which the most absurd stories of cancellation played out in 2020, it often was very left-leaning, homogeneous environments. 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.
So it’s not actually clear to me that this fear of being uncharitably interpreted and being called racist is 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 an invented or exaggerated accusation like that can fly a lot better than in an environment where people have real things to deal with.
Steele: Well, I’d agree with you. I think you can feel churn from that 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. It isn’t a racial diversity, but it’s perhaps ideological diversity, and it’s quite the same kind of thing. I’m in that setting worried about how I’m going to be judged, and I can’t trust it. I feel very uncomfortable there, and I can’t function in relation to it. I may react quite defensively or problematically.
So I think if we think of the construct, the experience of churn, we shouldn’t think of it 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 point to what I think is a relatively common kind of tension in diverse settings. It’s not that it never happens in a more homogeneous setting; it certainly can. But when you go up to twenty thousand feet and 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 age stereotypes, because we’re all old. I may be—I think it may be 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 age stereotypes, that my attitudes are a little antiquated, that my grasp of technology is inadequate.
That’s the phenomenon I’m talking about. As we integrate across these identities, we bring in this tension to some degree. It’s not something that, if we’re on the subway—and it’s a very diverse, but 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 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.
Mounk: I want to understand some other elements of this first. You have 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. Perhaps we can dive into each of them in a little more detail and understand them better.
I had an experience about a year ago that I thought was really interesting. I went into a USPS post office in a rural area, and the lady who was working there, who was white, was just extremely hostile—off the bat, for no good reason. Perhaps actually that was due to my identity in some kind of way—perhaps she’s prejudiced against people with beards, or against people with 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, or she was having a very bad day, she hated her job. I didn’t make it about myself.
I realized in that situation that in some ways—and I don’t love to use that word in general, but I think in this particular context it makes sense—there was a form of privilege in that situation, in that if I had gone into that post office and I was Latino, or I was black, or some other group where you might have a 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 out of the blue. What on earth could bring this on? It’s so irrational—it’s got to be that. Now, in fact, I presume that she treats the black people who walk into that post office just as badly as she treated me, and I presume that they very reasonably conclude that they’ve been the victim not just of a dysfunctional employee, but of racism in this instance.
Steele: They probably start to worry that they’re dealing with somebody racist. I’m not sure they’re convinced yet that the person is racist, but they start to worry, and that’s what churn is. They go to churn.
Mounk: Well, you didn’t see how extreme that woman was. But no, I agree with you.
Steele: 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: the way you felt about it. I’m not sure it requires actually believing that she is racist for sure. It’s certainly possible, and that possibility is what I’m concerned about.
Mounk: I agree. I guess what I’m trying to get at is: what is your advice to individuals, but also what is your advice to institutions, for how to deal with that? This is one of the sources of churn: sometimes in life you’re going to have unpleasant experiences, and if you’re a member of a minority group, you often won’t know what the source of that is. I think there are two kinds of attitudes you can have toward that, and both can have downsides. One attitude is to say, well, she didn’t call me a racial slur, 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. 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, that you’re naive about some of the challenges you face in society. On the other hand, you might say—and arguably our culture veered toward that in the last few years—well, every time you have that kind of 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. That obviously also has downsides, because it’s much less damaging to your self-perception, to your ease in moving in society, to think, as I do, that woman was weird, I don’t know what she was on about, than to think: I had this—in the grand scheme of things actually 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. 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’re welcoming a freshman class to Stanford, what would you tell them about how they should feel in a situation like that? How should we try to make sense of it?
Steele: The whole book tries to pick up exactly those kinds of questions. How do you reduce it at the level of individuals? How would you do it in a larger setting like a classroom or a workplace? How do whole institutions function in ways that reduce churn and build trust? This is the thing that sort of excited me about this line of thinking, and the evidence that I could find on its behalf, is that it points to a new road, a new way of thinking about diverse settings. 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 in human affairs—it’s very profoundly important. But this is something else.
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 that woman. She gave you enough cues there 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 in order to worry. But the way forward has to recognize that in diverse settings, perhaps the chief goal is building trust. That’s the heart of the case. That’s the heart of the argument here: that this is a dimension of intergroup relations that we just haven’t understood and recognized 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—that’s what I—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.
This is where some examples, I think, are especially helpful in maybe giving the audience a concrete image of what I’m talking about here. Jeff Cohen, Lee Ross, and I some years ago did an experiment where we asked a question like that: how does a white professor give critical feedback to a black student and have that feedback be trusted? We brought in Stanford students, white and black, and had them write an essay about their favorite teacher. We told them that if the essay was good, 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. That was our question: how much did they trust that feedback? What we varied was how we gave the feedback, looking for a way to establish trust of the sort that I’m talking about.
Mounk: What kind of feedback worked and what kind of feedback didn’t work?
Steele: In the first two conditions of the experiment, we gave the feedback straightforwardly—read your essay, here’s the feedback. 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 here’s the feedback. 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 society about their abilities, about their abilities maybe not being adequate. They’re not under that stereotype. Black students, however, are under that stereotype in American society. Reflecting that, they didn’t trust the feedback. It’s a 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. They just don’t know for sure.
Mounk: That was true when the comments at the beginning were positive, right? Obviously if you made negative comments about a student’s personality, 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 saying, you bring such a great personality to my class, you’re so wonderful, and having praised them, here’s my feedback. When the students say, look, this feels like this teacher is not being sincere, 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?
Steele: 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 the feedback giver’s opinion about my group’s abilities. What’s going on here? So even when the feedback is positive, I don’t really know how much I can trust it. Now, 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. But I’ve read your essay, and I think you can meet those standards. Here’s the feedback.
When that happened, the black students trusted the feedback more than any other group of participants in the experiment. They were ready to trust this situation. What they needed was some signal that they weren’t being seen in terms of negative stereotypes about their group. 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’s a good example of where this book goes in terms of how to function in a diverse environment. What’s critical, often, is simple evidence that you can trust the situation. Trust is a game—I want to stress this in case I don’t get to it later—it’s a game that’s played on the ground between people. It’s who listens to you, 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 you share an identity or have a vastly different identity. We’ve all had experiences like that. 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 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. I hope that’s a good example.
Mounk: It is a great example. Let me—obviously I’m a teacher as well, so I reflect a lot about these issues—draw out the implications of this, or ask you to help us draw out the implications of this. Let me give you a couple of examples. 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—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. But they need to have the same performance to get an A, and I try to encourage them in the same way. 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.
When I was starting to apply for faculty jobs, around 2015, 2016, it already was the custom that we should write teaching statements or diversity statements for a lot of those jobs. I was advised in very strong terms that anything like what I just said to you was unacceptable—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 particular experiences, that you’re going to see each student in terms of the structural challenges they’ve faced throughout their lives, and so on and so forth.
So do you think that the need to write these kinds of statements, and the particular culture about what’s expected to be in those statements, will actually systematically encourage teachers 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, 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 study, 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.
Steele: That’s bullshit advice, I think everybody knows. I think people with very good intentions 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. That new road forward, I think, is accessible to all of us, which is to build trust. It’s impossible for me to know every aspect of your culture and fit my language into it, and it just makes me self-conscious and unbelievable.
Here’s another example. This comes from the work of Erving Goffman in the 1950s. 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. 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 sees their full humanity, despite the stereotype and the stigma that those men, especially in that era, had to endure. The people 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, and you want to respond accordingly. That’s often 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 second, my background is important to me. I have had life experiences because of that identity, and if you’re just going to upfront ignore them, then I’m not sure I can trust what you say and how you behave going forward.
Either way, I think that advice is misguided, and that 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 a situation, trying to facilitate their development, in the workplace or in the classroom. Try to understand who they actually are. It’s so much simpler that sometimes people can’t appreciate it.
I’m trying to underline that here. That experiment, I think, holds a really important narrative. If you just looked at the first two conditions of the experiment, where the feedback was given straightforwardly, you’d think black students just don’t give a damn, that they’re not motivated—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. It becomes a completely different experience for them. I think this even points to some of the tragedies that can otherwise happen.
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.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Claude discuss how to put this advice into practice. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
