He is not a Pollyanna he argues we have not yet achieved a post-racial society, as illustrated by worsening school segregation and ongoing discrimination. In the last few chapters of the book, Steele offers some concrete remedies. This is a powerful idea, because it means that by changing the situation, we can effect a change in achievement. The same students from the same background will perform differently depending on the salience of stereotype threat. The change in how Staples was seen, from the stereotype of a potentially violence-prone African-American youth to an educated, refined person, reveals to Steele both the threat of historic stereotypes and the power of situational contingencies to diffuse that threat, both to the white passersby and to Staples himself.īy focusing on identity contingencies, particularly the identity threat that emerges when faced with a negative stereotype of one’s group, Steele and his colleagues take the heat off of the individual or the family for failures in performance. Staples noticed that when he whistled the tunes of classical composer Vivaldi, white passersby seemed to relax and some even smiled. Staples, an African-American, observed white individuals and couples reacting to him with fear as they walked past him in the Hyde Park neighborhood. The title of the book comes from the experience Steele describes of Brent Staples, now a columnist for the New York Times but at the time of the story a graduate student in Chicago. According to Steele, this phenomenon, which he and his colleagues call stereotype threat, permeates American culture, particularly in schools and colleges. Whether the group is white students who are told a golf task measured athletic ability, motivated women taking a difficult math test or high-ranking black students taking a test they believed to be of intellectual ability, the threat of stigma is sufficient to have a significant deleterious effect on performance. In “Whistling Vivaldi,” Claude Steele paints a compelling picture, through personal stories and research results, of how simply being aware of negative stereotypes toward our social group diminishes our ability to perform.
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