Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Talking to Strangers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Default to Truth
Limitations of Transparency
Coupling Theory and Context
Self vs. Stranger
Summary
Analysis
1. Gladwell identifies his second book, Blink (2005), as the first time he approached the subject of police interactions with African American people. In Blink, Gladwell explores the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, a young African immigrant whom police shot after mistaking him for a rape suspect. 2. As Gladwell researched Diallo’s case, he realized that his death was about more than bad policing: it was also about a clashing of disparate, unfamiliar cultures. In Diallo’s native West Africa, it is customary for a person to reach for their ID when an officer approaches them. In the South Bronx, such a gesture signifies to police a person grabbing a gun. In this way, Diallo’s shooting is as much a consequence of the stranger problem as it is indicative of bad policing.
Police shot Diallo after mistakenly believing he was reaching for his gun instead of his wallet. While their assumption might have been incorrect, it didn’t come from nowhere: it was an educated guess informed by past experiences that taught them to interpret Diallo’s gesture as a threat. Then, overconfidence in their informed guess prevented police from considering that they might be wrong. Bad policing directly caused Diallo’s death, but it’s imperative that we also identify the broader cultural issues that created those bad policing practices.
Themes
3. Gladwell admits to writing Talking to Strangers out of frustration. Since Diallo’s 2004 shooting, the country has seen numerous other police shootings of innocent Black men. When Gladwell began work on Talking to Strangers, he believed that America “had decided to tolerate a certain amount of police violence.”
Gladwell sheds additional light on what he wants Talking to Strangers to accomplish. Talking to Strangers recontextualizes Gladwell’s perceived tolerance for police brutality as symptomatic of a deeper systemic issue in the way we fail to understand other people, and our inability to even recognize this failure as an issue.
Themes
4. When a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, protests broke out around the country. Yet, Gladwell has a hard time feeling optimistic that positive changes will emerge out of the outrage. One slogan born of these protests was “defund the police,” yet officers who kill due to insufficient training need more training and funding, not less. One encouraging trend to emerge from the Floyd killing was a desire to “rethink[] policing.” Gladwell believes that officers need to be better trained to understand and empathize with people and deescalate the very different types of conflict that the country tasks them with deescalating.
Gladwell believes responses the George Floyd killing fail to address the root problem underlying police brutality: our inability to talk to strangers. Gladwell believes it is unproductive and inaccurate to suggest that our society’s bad policing exists separate from society. Police officers who kill aren’t anomalies: they’re the product of a society whose increasingly diverse members have made it glaringly obvious how poorly it teaches people to understand strangers.
Themes
Gladwell considers the term “emotional labor,” which he defines as “the work that goes into the public management of emotions.” It’s the work society requires of flight attendants, teachers, and waitresses. Gladwell thinks that we should require this same labor of law enforcement. To be sure, Brian Encinia appeared incapable of containing his fear the day he pulled over Bland. Gladwell argues that policing in this country could be more humane and effective if we understand the difficult tasks required of law enforcement and give them the training they need to undertake those tasks. After all, everyone is bad at talking to strangers—not just police officers.
Gladwell considers today’s criticism of police as yet another variant of our stranger problem. We fail to recognize that the flaws of modern policing are the flaws of the broader culture. Gladwell believes we ought to approach the systemic flaws of modern policing the same way we ought to approach our failed stranger encounters. We need to learn to communicate with humility and openness rather than blame.
Themes
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