Claude Steele

Dr. Steele will discuss his concept: when two people, or groups of people, each with their contingencies of identity, are attempting to communicate across differences, there is a lot going on cognitively, affectively, and emotionally in these situations.

“Here we have an American conversation… these pressures are coming from our history, the roles our history has assigned us, and the stereotypes that history has created to justify the roles that it has assigned us. We can think of things from a strictly colorblind frame of mind, that history is in the past… but as Faulkner famously said, the past is never dead, it’s not even past. We can feel this in a moment-to-moment way when we are interacting with each other. That history and its stereotypes and the pressures and tensions it creates can make it very difficult for us to trust each other.”

Without prior work done to build trust, Steele observes,

“…we’re left with these pressures to contend with in our efforts to relate to each other, to be part of a successfully diverse community in an institution or in a classroom. These kinds of pressures can enter the picture … a sort of tension between remembering and forgetting. ‘Do I remember how my group is seen and treated in society … and use that to interpret what’s happening to me in this immediate situation? Or do I just forget that, and trust the situation?’ That kind of tension is what I mean with the term churn.”

Churn is the worry about how one’s identity, in light of all of this context, plays out in the subjective experience of a diverse situation. To Steele, this “identity churn” is a “huge part” of the challenge of diversity, and trust is the critical issue in the functioning of our institutions.