Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

The book opens with the story of Sandra Bland, an African American woman from Illinois. In July 2015, Bland secured a new job at a university outside of Houston, Texas. The day after her job interview, she was pulled over by a police officer for failing to signal a lane change. The interaction between Bland and the officer—a white man named Brian Encinia—started off quite normally. Things rapidly started to go downhill when Bland lit a cigarette and Encinia requested that she put it out. Their exchange became increasingly heated. Encinia tried to pull her out of her car, arrested her, and put her in jail. Three days later, Bland killed herself in her cell.

Bland’s death came in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement, which arose in 2014 after a black man was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, the news has featured story after story of police violence against black people in the United States. People have debated whether these stories come down to systemic racism or individual “bad cops.” In Gladwell’s view, one side overlooks the details of each situation while the other misses the bigger picture.