01| Ask people what they are most afraid of being called and the honest answers cluster. Not poor. Not ugly. Not weak. Dumb. Poor can be temporary. Ugly can be argued about. Dumb is a verdict on the machine you think with, and there is no appeal, because the thing you would use to appeal it is the thing being questioned. 02| That is why the word does so much work. In every society we know of, intelligence is the accepted justification for hierarchy. The smart decide, the rest

01| The claim that some groups of humans are born with less intelligence was not a superstition that people slowly outgrew. It was built, deliberately, by educated men, at the exact moment it became commercially necessary. 02| The timing gives it away. Slavery is older than any of the ideologies used to justify it; ancient slave systems generally did not argue that the enslaved were a separate and lesser kind of human, because they did not need to. The captive was simply the

01| Two contradictions sit at the centre of this history, and neither has been resolved. Both are still doing damage, and the second one is doing it inside the community we work with. 02| The first is the Enlightenment's. A movement that made reason the ground of human dignity, and then spent enormous effort explaining why the reasoning of certain people did not count. Liberty for all, on paper; a carefully ranked ladder of who qualifies as "all," in practice. Philosophers es

01| A stigma that stayed outside the person would be a manageable problem. You would fight the gatekeeper, change the law, replace the manager. The reason this one is different is that it gets in, and once in it does not present itself as an opinion about your group. It presents itself as an accurate assessment of you specifically. 02| Start at the beginning, because it starts absurdly early. Long before a child can define race or class, they can read a room. They can see who

01| Now put the pieces in order, because the order is the whole argument. 02| A claim of inferiority is manufactured and repeated for centuries. It is absorbed by the people it targets. Absorbed, it produces a reflex to avoid intellectual exposure. Avoidance means less practice. Less practice means genuinely weaker performance at the moment performance is finally required. Weaker performance is observed — by the world, and worse, by the person themselves — and read as confirm

01| There is a comfortable story about prejudice: it is a leftover, an irrational hangover from a darker time, steadily eroding as generations turn over. The story is comfortable because it requires nothing of anyone except patience. 02| We think it is wrong, or at least badly incomplete. Bias persists partly because it pays, and it pays the most in exactly the places where competition is most brutal — the middle-class-and-up labor markets, where a limited number of good posi

01| The filter described in the last chapter has a second cost, and this one lands on the people doing the filtering. They are selecting on the wrong variable. 02| Consider what a professional selection process actually measures. School, credential, previous employer, referral, presentation, ease in the room. Every one of those is a record of access — to fees, to a stable childhood, to a network, to years of practice in middle-class settings. They are not fake signals; they c

01| The question this book part exists to answer: can stigma and bias be undone, or at least reduced, by training? Two different targets, two different answers, and it is worth being blunt about both. 02| Target one is the bias in other people's heads — the gatekeeper, the manager, the loan officer. The evidence here is not encouraging. Two decades of corporate unconscious-bias training have produced disappointing results in the studies that followed outcomes rather than sati