Renfro is firm but understanding, like a father chiding a small child for being rude to the dinner guests. The two of them have agreed to frame the tragic death of Sandra Bland as a personal encounter gone awry, and now they are at the stage where Renfro is critiquing Encinia’s table manners.
Encinia: At no point was I ever trying to be discourteous or trying to downplay any of her response. I was just simply asking her if she was done, to make sure she had what she needed out, and that way I could move on with completing the traffic stop and/or identifying what possibly may or may not be in the area.
Renfro: Is it fair to say that she could have possibly taken that as being sarcastic?
Encinia: It is possible, yes, sir. Those were not my intentions.
Oh, so it was her mistake, was it? Apparently, Bland misinterpreted his intonation. If you are blind to the ideas that underlie our mistakes with strangers—and to the institutions and practices that we construct around those ideas—then all you are left with is the personal: the credulous Mountain Climber, the negligent Graham Spanier, the sinister Amanda Knox, the doomed Sylvia Plath. And now Sandra Bland, who—at the end of the lengthy postmortem into that fateful traffic stop on FM 1098—somehow becomes the villain of the story.
Renfro: Did you ever reflect back on your training at that point and think about that you may have stopped a subject that just didn’t like police officers? Did that ever occur to you?
Encinia: Yes sir.…That is a possibility, that she did not like police officers.
Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
1 This is why Bland is so irritated, of course. “I feel like it’s crap what I’m getting a ticket for. I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over and you stop me,” she says. Meaning: a police car came speeding up behind her. She got out of its way, as a motorist is supposed to do, and now the same police officer who forced her to change lanes is giving her a ticket for improperly changing lanes. Encinia caused the infraction.
2 There is significant evidence that African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to traffic stops than white Americans, meaning the particular indignity of the false positive is not equally distributed across all citizens. It is concentrated on those citizens who already suffer from other indignities.
3 In later projects with Scotland Yard in London, when the police were trying to curb a wave of knife killings among teenagers, Sherman would insist that patrol officers leave their cards with everyone they talked to.
“They were sometimes doing five hundred stops a night,” Sherman said, “and they were handing a receipt to everyone they stopped that said essentially, ‘This is my name, this is my badge number. If you have any complaints or questions about anything I did, you can follow up with this receipt.’”
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Acknowledgments
Talking to Strangers, like all books, was a team effort, and I am grateful that my teammates are among the best. The folks at Little, Brown were a delight to work with: my brilliant editor, Asya Muchnick, my champion Reagan Arthur, and all the others who supported this book from the beginning: Elizabeth Garriga, Pamela Marshall, Allan Fallow, and countless others at the best publishing house in America. Helen Conford at Penguin UK said the most British thing ever: “Lots of third rails! I love it!” Special thanks to Eloise Lynton, my tireless fact checker, Camille Baptista, who answered a million of my questions, and my agent, Tina Bennett, without whom I’d be writing longhand on parchment in an unheated garret somewhere. Countless friends took the time to read the manuscript and offer their advice: Adam Alter, Ann Banchoff, Tali Farhadian, Henry Finder, Mala Gaonkar, Emily Hunt, all the Lyntons, Brit Marling, Kate Moore, Wesley Neff, Kate Taylor, Lily and Jacob Weisberg, and Dave Wirtshafter.
I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone.
Special thanks as always to my mother, who taught me to write clearly and simply. Sadly, my father died before I could finish. He would have read it carefully, mused about it, and then said something thoughtful or funny. Or possibly both. It is a lesser book without his contribution.
Notes
Talking to Strangers was written over a span of three years. In the course of my research, I conducted countless interviews and read many hundreds of books and articles. Unless otherwise attributed, quotations in the text are from my interviews.
What follows is not meant to be a definitive account of everything that influenced my thinking. It is simply a list of what I consider the most important of those sources. It is almost certainly the case that I have left some things out. Should you see anything that falls into that category or instances where I am plainly in error, please contact me at [email protected] and I will be happy to correct the record.
Introduction: “Step out of the car!”
The Sandra Bland case was the subject of a 2018 HBO documentary, Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland, directed and produced by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner. Say Her Name was created with the full cooperation of Bland’s family, and it does a very good job of describing her life and capturing her spirit. However, it feeds into the speculation—common in various corners of the internet—that there was something suspicious about Bland’s death. I do not find those suspicions persuasive, and Say Her Name presents no real evidence to support them. The heartbreak of Sandra Bland is, as you have just read, more complicated—and, tragically, more systemic—than that.
“I am up today just praising God…”: “Sandy Speaks on her birthday! February 7th, 2015,” YouTube, February 7, 2015, accessed January 10, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfrZM2Qjvtc.
has been viewed in one form or another several million times: See Texas Department of Public Safety video (963K views), WSJ video (42K views), second WSJ video (37k views), plus sites without video-view counts such as nytimes.com and nbc.com.
Transcript up to “for a failure to signal?”: “Sandra Bland Traffic Stop,” Texas Department of Public Safety, YouTube, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaW09Ymr2BA.
Michael Brown was shot to death: Rachel Clarke and Christopher Lett, “What happened when Michael Brown met Officer Darren Wilson,” CNN, November 11, 2014, https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/08/us/ferguson-brown-timeline/.
In Baltimore, a young black man named Freddie Gray…Scott was killed on April 4, 2015: Peter Herman and John Woodrow Cox, “A Freddie Gray primer: Who was he, how did he die, why is there so much anger?” Washington Post, April 28, 2015,https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/04/28/a-freddie-gray-primer-who-was-he-how-did-he-why-is-there-so-much-anger. For Philando Castile, see Mark Berman, “Minnesota officer charged with manslaughter for shooting Philando Castile during incident on Facebook,” Washington Post, November 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/11/16/prosecutors-to-announce-update-on-investigation-into-shooting-of-philando-castile/?utm_term=.1e7914da2c3b. For Eric Garner, see Deborah Bloom and Jareen Imam, “New York man dies after chokehold by police,” CNN, December 8, 2014, https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/20/justice/ny-chokehold-death/index.html. For Walter Scott, see Michael Miller, Lindsey Bever, and Sarah Kaplan, “How a cellphone video led to murder charges against a cop in North Charleston, S.C.,” Washington Post, April 8, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/08/how-a-cell-phone-video-led-to-murder-charges-against-a-cop-in-north-charleston-s-c/?utm_term=.476f73934c34.
“Good morning…and still be killed”: “Sandy Speaks—April 8th 2015 (Black Lives Matter),” YouTube, April 8, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIKeZgC8lQ4.
Confrontation between Cortés and Montezuma: William Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Modern Library, 1980).
“When we saw so many cities”: Bernal Diaz del Cast
illo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 270, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.152204/page/n295.
Description of first meeting up to “Yes, I am he”: Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Cortés, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 279.
“innumerable rooms inside…and admirable white fur robes”: Thomas, Conquest, p. 280.
The idea that Montezuma considered Cortés a god (in footnote): Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 659–87.
“The impossibility of adequately translating…Spanish surrender”: Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History (New York: Harper Collins, 2018), p. 345.
If you are interested in the Cortés-Montezuma story, I strongly recommend the last two of these sources. Restall’s book is marvelous. And Townsend is that rarest of historians, able to write scholarly history in academic journals that reads like it was written for all of us.
Chapter One: Fidel Castro’s Revenge
“I am a case officer from Cuban Intelligence. I am an intelligence comandante”: This account is taken from Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 26.
one of the former Havana station chiefs: Herald Staff, “Spy work celebrated at museum in Havana,” Miami Herald, July 16, 2001, http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/espionage/spy-museum.htm.
until he had listed dozens of names: Benjamin B. Fischer, “Doubles Troubles: The CIA and Double Agents during the Cold War,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 21, no. 1 (2016): 48–74.
There were detailed explanations of which park bench: I. C. Smith, Inside: A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies, and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI (Nashville: Nelson Current, 2004), pp. 95–96.
CIA officer stuffing cash: Herald Staff, “Spy work celebrated at museum in Miami,” Miami Herald, July 16, 2001.
“we were in the enviable position…to the Americans.”: Here Fischer quotes from Markus Wolf, with Anne McElvoy, Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1997), p. 285.
Chapter Two: Getting to Know der Führer
The account of Chamberlain and Hitler is taken from a number of sources, but chiefly David Faber’s excellent Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), pp. 272–96; “so unconventional…breath away,” p. 229; that 70 percent of the country thought Chamberlain’s trip was a “good thing for peace” and the toast to Chamberlain’s health, pp. 284–85; Chamberlain’s speech at Heston Airport and the reaction to it, p. 296; “no signs of insanity…beyond a certain point,” p. 302; “between a social gathering and a rough house,” p. 300; “mixture of astonishment, repugnance, and compassion,” p. 40. Faber is quoting from British diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick’s account of the event in his memoir, The Inner Circle (London: Macmillan & Company, 1959), p. 97; and “borderline into insanity,” p. 257.
The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours. I suppose that makes a certain sense: you need to be exposed to a fraud before you can fall for a fraud. On the other hand, Hitler’s dupes were all intelligent men, well experienced in world affairs, with plenty of suspicions going into their meeting. Why didn’t whatever extra information they could gather on Hitler from a face-to-face meeting lead to an improvement in the accuracy of their opinion of him? See also Faber, Munich, 1938, pp. 285, 302, 351; Chamberlain’s third and final visit to Germany, p. 414; “Herr Hitler was telling the truth,” p. 302; “This morning…as mine,” p. 4; “sleep quietly in your beds,” pp. 6–7.
For King’s admiration of Hitler (in footnote), see W. L. Mackenzie King’s Diary, June 29, 1937, National Archives of Canada, MG 26 J Series 13, https://www.junobeach.org/canada-in-wwii/articles/aggression-and-impunity/w-l-mackenzie-kings-diary-june-29-1937/.
“In certain moods…marvelous drollery”: Diana Mosley, A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley (London: Gibson Square, 2002), p. 124.
“Halfway down the steps…the house painter he was”: Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, September 19, 1938, in Robert Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters: Volume Four: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), p. 346; “In short…given his word,” p. 348; “Hitler’s appearance…friendly demonstrations” and “Hitler frequently…brought with me,” Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, October 2, 1938, p. 350.
A good account of Halifax’s visit to Berlin is here: Lois G. Schwoerer, “Lord Halifax’s Visit to Germany: November 1937,” The Historian 32, no. 3 (May 1970): 353–75.
Hitler even had a nickname for Henderson: Peter Neville, Hitler and Appeasement: The British Attempt to Prevent the Second World War (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), p. 150.
Hitler, he believed, “hates war as much as anyone”: Abraham Ascher, Was Hitler a Riddle? Western Democracies and National Socialism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 73.
Göring “loved animals and children…teach squeamishness to the young” (in footnote): Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–39 (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1940), p. 82.
Anthony Eden…saw the truth of him: See D. R. Thorpe, The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1897–1997 (New York: Random House, 2003).
For Sendhil Mullainathan’s study, see Jon Kleinberg et al., “Human Decisions and Machine Predictions,” NBER Working Paper 23180, February 2017; this is an early version of Kleinberg et al., “Human Decisions and Machine Predictions,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 1 (February 2018): 237–93.
Pronin had them fill in the blank spaces: Emily Pronin et al., “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 4 (2001): 639–56, APA PsychNET.
I quoted part of Pronin’s conclusion. But the whole paragraph is worth considering:
The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.
Those are wise words.
Chapter Three: The Queen of Cuba
“Homeland or death, you bastards”: Transcript taken from the documentary Shoot Down, directed by Cristina Khuly (Palisades Pictures, 2007). That Juan Roque was the Cubans’ source inside Hermanos al Rescate is also from the documentary.
The U.S. government was aware of growing Cuban anger about the Hermanos al Rescate missions for some time before the shoot-down occurred and had alerted the organization, mainly by communicating directly with its leader, Jose Basulto. Through the summer and fall of 1995, the State Department and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) made public statements and cautioned the organization that no flight plan to Cuba was acceptable. At one point the FAA tried to revoke Basulto’s pilot license. Government warnings slowed in the fall of 1996, however, because officials felt that further alerts were “more likely to provoke Basulto than to quiet him down.” By this period, the Clinton adm
inistration and Hermanos al Rescate were at odds because of Clinton’s 1995 “wet feet, dry feet policy,” which forced Cuban rafters to repatriate.
The State Department knew about the shoot-down threat after meeting with Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll on the 23rd, but the government did not contact Hermanos al Rescate. Instead, the State Department warned the FAA the night before the attack that “it would not be unlikely that [Hermanos al Rescate would] attempt an unauthorized flight into Cuban airspace tomorrow.” In response, the FAA arranged for radar centers to pay special attention to flights over the Florida Straits. However, when radar monitors spotted the MiGs on the 24th, still no warning was issued to the pilots. Despite the fact that F-15 fighter jets were ready for action, the go-ahead to protect the planes never came. The U.S. government later blamed communication issues for its failure to protect the Hermanos al Rescate pilots. Basulto, who survived the incident, suggested the attack was the result of a conspiracy between Cuban leaders and the U.S. government. This account is taken from Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The United States and Cuba: Intimate Enemies (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 52.
This was an embarrassing revelation: Scott Carmichael, True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007), p. 5.
“CNN Interview with Admiral Eugene Carroll—U.S. Navy Rear Admiral (Ret.),” CNN, February 25, 1996, Transcript #47-22, http://www.hermanos.org/CNN%20Interview%20with%20Admiral%20Eugene%20Carroll.htm.
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