Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell Page 0,106
she could have possibly taken that as being sarcastic?
Encinia: It is possible, yes, sir. Those were not my intentions.
Oh, so it was her mistake, was it? Apparently, Bland misinterpreted his intonation. If you are blind to the ideas that underlie our mistakes with strangers—and to the institutions and practices that we construct around those ideas—then all you are left with is the personal: the credulous Mountain Climber, the negligent Graham Spanier, the sinister Amanda Knox, the doomed Sylvia Plath. And now Sandra Bland, who—at the end of the lengthy postmortem into that fateful traffic stop on FM 1098—somehow becomes the villain of the story.
Renfro: Did you ever reflect back on your training at that point and think about that you may have stopped a subject that just didn’t like police officers? Did that ever occur to you?
Encinia: Yes sir.…That is a possibility, that she did not like police officers.
Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
1 This is why Bland is so irritated, of course. “I feel like it’s crap what I’m getting a ticket for. I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over and you stop me,” she says. Meaning: a police car came speeding up behind her. She got out of its way, as a motorist is supposed to do, and now the same police officer who forced her to change lanes is giving her a ticket for improperly changing lanes. Encinia caused the infraction.
2 There is significant evidence that African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to traffic stops than white Americans, meaning the particular indignity of the false positive is not equally distributed across all citizens. It is concentrated on those citizens who already suffer from other indignities.
3 In later projects with Scotland Yard in London, when the police were trying to curb a wave of knife killings among teenagers, Sherman would insist that patrol officers leave their cards with everyone they talked to.
“They were sometimes doing five hundred stops a night,” Sherman said, “and they were handing a receipt to everyone they stopped that said essentially, ‘This is my name, this is my badge number. If you have any complaints or questions about anything I did, you can follow up with this receipt.’”
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Acknowledgments
Talking to Strangers, like all books, was a team effort, and I am grateful that my teammates are among the best. The folks at Little, Brown were a delight to work with: my brilliant editor, Asya Muchnick, my champion Reagan Arthur, and all the others who supported this book from the beginning: Elizabeth Garriga, Pamela Marshall, Allan Fallow, and countless others at the best publishing house in America. Helen Conford at Penguin UK said the most British thing ever: “Lots of third rails! I love it!” Special thanks to Eloise Lynton, my tireless fact checker, Camille Baptista, who answered a million of my questions, and my agent, Tina Bennett, without whom I’d be writing longhand on parchment in an unheated garret somewhere. Countless friends took the time to read the manuscript and offer their advice: Adam Alter, Ann Banchoff, Tali Farhadian, Henry Finder, Mala Gaonkar, Emily Hunt, all the Lyntons, Brit Marling, Kate Moore, Wesley Neff, Kate Taylor, Lily and Jacob Weisberg, and Dave Wirtshafter.
I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone.
Special thanks as always to my mother, who taught me to write clearly and simply. Sadly, my father died before I could finish. He would have read it carefully, mused about it, and then said something thoughtful or funny. Or possibly both. It is a lesser book without his contribution.
Notes
Talking to Strangers was written over a span of three years. In the course of my research, I conducted countless interviews and read many hundreds of books and articles. Unless otherwise attributed, quotations in the text are from my interviews.
What follows is not meant to be a definitive account of everything that influenced my thinking. It is simply a list of what I consider the most important of those sources. It is almost certainly the case that I have left some things out. Should you see anything that falls into that category or instances where I am plainly in error, please contact me at lbpublicity.generichbgusa and I will be happy to correct the record.