# Talking to Strangers

![rw-book-cover](https://is5-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Publication114/v4/97/a2/41/97a241d0-603a-71a0-b67d-29525bc3672d/9780316535625.jpg/1400x2257w.jpg)

## Metadata
- Author: [[Malcolm Gladwell]]
- Full Title: Talking to Strangers
- Category: #books

## Highlights
- Black people, you will not be successful in this world until you learn how to work with white people
- Talking to Strangers is an attempt to understand what really happened by the side of the highway that day in rural Texas.
- One side made the discussion about racism—looking down at the case from ten thousand feet. The other side examined each detail of each case with a magnifying glass. What was the police officer like? What did he do, precisely? One side saw a forest, but no trees. The other side saw trees and no forest.
- If there was a pattern to the endless conflict, it was that battles overwhelmingly involved neighbors.
- You fought the person directly across the border, who had always been directly across your border. Or you fought someone inside your own borders:
- The people you met and fought often believed in the same God as you, built their buildings and organized their cities in the same way you did, fought their wars with the same weapons according to the same rules.
- Is it any wonder why the meeting between Cortés and Montezuma has fascinated historians for so many centuries?
- In that case, Montezuma’s speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender.
- Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own.
- is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators.
- Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.
- Each of the chapters that follows is devoted to understanding a different aspect of the stranger problem.