Talking to Strangers

I don't think I ever would have picked up this book on my own. But the point of a book club is to get outside your comfort zone a little bit. To give a fair chance to books you might not otherwise look twice at. So I picked it up and read it.

Honestly, I found most of this book to be incredibly frustrating. Gladwell opens with the confrontation between Sandra Bland, the black woman who was arrested on a traffic violation and subsequently found dead by apparent suicide in her jail cell, and Brian Encinia, the cop who arrested her. There is video of the incident, so we can all see exactly what happened. But the video lacks most of the context. So Gladwell went in search of that context, which he presents in this book as an extended inquiry into what exactly happened between Bland and Encinia.

Most of the book is focused on a person's ability to sift lies from the truth. Gladwell argues that we default to believing that people are telling us the truth. That it takes a great deal of evidence to flip us from this default optimism to cynicism. That this is further muddied by our assumption that a person's facial expressions and body language matches their internal feelings. Gladwell demonstrates this using a few high profile case studies: Brock Turner, Jerry Sandusky, Bernie Madoff, Amanda Knox.

The research he presents is interesting, but I found myself frustrated for most of the book. I felt that he was over-simplifying the problem, or looking at it from the wrong angle. Gladwell assumes that all humans judge each other from equal footing, which ignores the very real power imbalances in our country. Those power imbalances shift the story, both for the people in any given confrontation and for those observing it. 

 He also never really addresses how our biases affect our ability to tell truth from lies. This could have been a great chapter, starting with the human brain's default to pattern matching. We're hard-wired to sort everything around us into categories and make judgements based on those categories. This is a largely advantageous way to look at the world, as made apparent by our species' success. But it also gives rise to stereotypes and bigotry, biases we are often blind to within ourselves. This folds in so nicely with his argument about humans defaulting to believing something is true, that I still can't believe he didn't address it.

Because the thing about all his case studies is that the majority didn't just assume that Turner and Sandusky and Madoff were telling the truth. They assumed that Emily Doe was lying, that Sandusky's victims were too young to be reliable witness. We don't assume that everyone around us it telling the truth. When a story has two sides, we make a decision about which side to believe. And that decision is all tied up power dynamics, in race and class and age and gender and sexuality and a million other things.

We don't just assume that the truth is a default. We assume a default person: a rich, straight, white, man. And the further someone strays from that default, the less likely we are to believe they're telling the truth.

So, I had some issues with this book.

But I'm glad I read it. Ultimately, Gladwell made the same argument I would have: that Encinia abused his power as a police officer and Bland should never have been stopped, let alone arrested. That Encinia was not only supported by the police force, that he had in fact been trained to abuse his power. That this abuse of power is an epidemic in our country doing much more harm than good.

Gladwell came at this situation from an entirely different angle than I did, but he arrived at the same place. Having read this book and heard his argument, I feel that my own argument is much stronger. And that can only be to my benefit.

This was a good reminder to me to seek out and listen to people who don't fully agree with me. My frustration with this book crystallized my own arguments and forced me to really articulate them to myself. And realizing that we were ultimately on the same page was good, too. It reminded me to have faith in people who seem like they're missing the point. Because maybe I'm missing the point, too. And we're better together.

Book club's going to be interesting though.