Subtitled “The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It”, Churn is a worthy follow-up to Steele’s previous book, Whistling Vivaldi. That book was eye opening for me (you can read my summary here), as he showed how stereotype threat can significantly affect people’s performance, even in situations where there was no actual bias at play (and, yes, bias is also often being expressed).
In this book, he names that experience of struggling against stereotype threat as churn, “the mental agitation and physical stress we can experience in diverse settings”. Churn might show up with questions like “How are people like me seen and treated here? Will I be supported here? Will it be a fair place for people like me?” In such settings, “stressful emotions can arise” as we “scramble to decipher and make meaning”. Steele’s hope: “Could reducing churn — by making people more comfortable with each other — be a way of reducing prejudice itself?”
One notable aspect of churn is that it is not only experienced by people from underrepresented populations; a white person may wonder if they will be described as racist in an interaction with Black or Hispanic people and subsequently cancelled. With that more expansive definition, he asks “Does the stress of churn lead people to avoid diverse settings? Does it make it difficult for people to flourish in them?” If so, developing practices that reduce churn could help depolarize our society by opening “new pathways to diversifying our institutions, schools, neighborhoods, civic organizations, even our personal relationships”.
Steele zeroes in on trust as the key factor: “When we trust, we accept. When we distrust, we resist. We look for alternative meanings and scenarios. And if the situation is important, we do this a lot; we churn. … What brings on trustful thinking and the cessation of churn is some signal that a person or situation is indeed trustworthy. [Such trust signals] calm churn. They’re churn’s kryptonite.”
To enable trust, Steele suggests we need to embody a quality of “wiseness”, “an understanding that identity differences are not categorical, essentialist differences but are different manifestations of a shared and equal humanity. It sees these differences as rooted more in different conditions of life that groups contend with than in something essential about groups’ nature or character. It stresses the equal humanity they share. It’s an understanding that renders identity differences less threatening and easier to engage, and invites a learning mindset, a respectful curiosity, toward difference — as a chance to expand one’s understanding of the world.” To demonstrate this “wiseness” is to “give people a chance to tell you how they’d like to be understood”.
The reason such “wiseness” decreases churn is that people operate with reciprocity: “People give trust when they get trust, and distrust when they get distrust.” An example of how effective this approach can be comes from a study of nonviolent protest movements: “Nonviolent campaigns were ten times more likely to be successful than violent ones. They seem better able to inspire trust between people on opposing sides of a divide, reduce the doubting churn that otherwise exists between them, and thus enable more cooperation going forward.”
Another example of how the “wiseness” of understanding people’s challenges is how Georgia State University significantly improved graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students. They studied what led to those students dropping out, and created supportive programs for those challenges, including an onboarding and orientation program to set clear expectations for incoming students. But because those “supports are available and used by everyone, they’re not seen as based on race or ethnicity — something [that] could be stigmatizing. [That] normalization helps minority students have a strong sense of belonging.” Instead of giving students more “freedom”, which serves those whose backgrounds provide the support and structure to take advantage of that freedom, greater structure and clearer orientation can equalize people’s experiences, regardless of their background.
Taking all of that context into account, he recommends a strategy of:
- Seeing: understanding the challenges people are facing in a system by asking them questions, rather than assuming you know the problem.
- Welcoming: expressing the conviction that they belong and that they can reach the high standards of the institution, no matter their starting point. It’s especially important here to normalize that everybody will struggle to meet those standards; otherwise, people experiencing churn may feel they are disproportionately struggling, but the truth is that everybody is struggling, just less visibly.
- Supporting: providing targeted early support (based on what you learned in step 1) to address typical challenges, and to offer that support to everyone, not just those of a particular background. By giving them the information they need to solve their problems early, people develop the confidence that they belong and can handle the challenges that arise.
What I particularly like about Steele’s book is that he is sharing cultural tools that we can use to build more trust between our increasingly factionalized society. The book “focuses less on the nature or politics of identity and more on what it takes to build trust between people of different identities — even oppositional identities — in the real life settings of our lives.”
Backed by a wealth of research, Steele’s book offers hope of how each of us can contribute to a more welcoming and egalitarian society in an age where institutional DEI efforts are once again under threat.
