Several years ago, I participated in a DEI workshop and the leader asked us to read a book, a series of essays designed to help the reader understand the challenges of being African American in the US.

I enjoyed reading the book and I’m not sorry I read it. I didn’t grow up in an integrated area. The places I lived were predominantly white or Latino, with a smattering of people from Asia; my parents didn’t have any Black friends and I didn’t either (there was literally one African American in my high-school, and he was a jock and I was a drama freak). One of the things that drew me to NYC was the diversity; and it was also a really hard adjustment for me. My lack of experience made me clumsy and I made mistakes. (Dumb mistakes but I never asked to touch someone’s hair – that’s just gross, asking to touch anyone’s hair. Who does that?)

Even now, so many years later, I am always grateful to learn more about how I can support people who think or learn or look different than I do. So I appreciate the DEI training I received and I got a lot out of it; and yet, the book we were assigned during DEI training didn’t appeal to me as a reader, I don’t remember enough about it to explain why.

The following year, I stumbled across Talking to Strangers. I enjoy Gladwell’s work and was surprised that I missed this one, which came out in 2019. I suspect it was subsumed by current events happening at the time, overshadowed by politics.

It is different than Gladwell’s earlier books, less playful. More thoughtful. At the start of the book, Gladwell talks about the book’s genesis, his desire to understand Sandra Bland’s death and the events leading up to it. How did we get where we are today? Why do we find ourselves in this place?

He explores several contributing factors, among them shifts in policing theory that somehow got detached from the science behind them as frightened communities reached for easy fixes and ended up with stop and frisk. If you are still confused about what what lies behind the sudden acceleration in cop on black violence, even as improvements occurred in other areas, I found Gladwell insightful.

I can’t do it justice without retelling the whole story and it’s better if you read it yourself. After listening to someone who refused to read one of his earlier books contribute at a reading group that they thin-sliced when they drove because they often went into driving-fugue and woke up at home with no memory of the journey, I am leery of explaining Gladwell to others.

The one area of the book that struck me at the time, and that I have been reflecting on since then, was his discussion of transparency theory: the assumption that many of us know what emotions others are thinking based on their facial expressions, body language, and actions. We assume that people who are happy smile, and those who are sad, cry. If someone smiles when they are sad and cries when happy, we misread their emotions, sometimes with terrible consequences, especially when two people with different backgrounds come into conflict and one of them has a gun.

But the part of this section of the book that stayed with me, was not what was going on inside the head of someone who isn’t reacting in the stereotypical way, but the idea that we often think we know what is going on with someone better than they know themselves. That we have the ability to diagnose others and prescribe solutions for them, because of our all-knowing insight.

This is a habit many of us have: knowing what is better for people than they know themselves. Police Officers do it to African American boys that they stop for “wide turns” – to use an example I heard on (I’m pretty sure it was) PBS News Hour the other day. Parents do it to children, children do it to parents. Bosses do it to employees. Employees know they can fix bosses, if they would just listen. The entire coaching industry has sprung up around this idea. Coaching, in and of itself, is listening and reflecting. But many coaches add to that advising – and, of course they do, no one is going to pay you for just listening and reflecting: they pay you for professional advice. Or so we think.

You see it on the internet all the time: article after article about how to parent, how to manage, how to lead, how to find a job or keep a job or leave a job, how to cook, how to clean, how to lose weight, how to shop. It feels like everyone knows how to do things so much better than you do.

And I get so tired of it.

I get tired of telling my husband or my mom or my sister how to treat their depression, because depressed people are notoriously bad at taking advice. But it is so easy, when you care deeply about someone or something, and you think you can see the solution from outside, to tell them what it is. To tell them how to lose weight or gain weight or grow stronger or make friends or find a hobby – and you know that will solve their problem. Although you may not take your own advice.

In any case, at the risk of telling you what to do, I recommend that you read this book.