Werewolf

Everyone has to talk to strangers and deal with uncertainty, and I am no different. Even if you don't frequent pubs or parties, you might have been invited to play a game Werewolf recently.

That's a popular social deduction game in which you're being assigned different identities. Everyone else becomes a stranger. Then, little by little, night by night, you will have to figure out who is who. It's when, and only when, the villagers find out the werewolves without being killed, the game ends.

The tricky part of the game is, more often than not, you won't be able to decipher the identity of strangers. And that's no small thing. Werewolf kills. Ultimately, each player is killed by the werewolf. The villagers all die, and nobody is left alive.

Nobody, that is, but werewolves. Uh-oh.

Which brings me, somewhat uncomfortably, to Malcolm Gladwell's new book Talking to Strangers.

In no way am I suggesting that I made a mistake in choosing his book. I don't, and you won't. Gladwell is razor sharp. What made me uncomfortable is Gladwell's narrative of Sandra Bland, a young African American who drove from Chicago to start a new job, but was then pulled over by a police officer Brian Encinia. The white police officer first told her that she had failed to signal a lane change, and then challenged her to put out her cigarette. It's only a cigarette. But Encinia got angry and forced her to step out of the car, without good reason. He yanked her out, slapped her, and then arrested her.

I know: that's ridiculous to arrest someone who failed to signal a lane change and was smoking inside her own car. Seriously, what kind of bully is this? But hear me out. The truth is, Sandra Bland was taken into custody on felony assault charges. Three days later she was found dead in her cell, hanging from a noose fashioned from a plastic bag.

That is what happened to one of the tragic citizens who died because the police was making no sense of a stranger.