I mean, it really the swimming pool restriction really affected how my life was going to be. But if they told you can only swim at the pool on Wednesdays, suddenly you were pretty interested in race.ĭr. And the reason for that became because we were black, because we were African-American.Īnd that was, in some ways, the first realization I had of being black and that the other kids I lived around were also black and that we had this contingency of identity, as I've been calling it, to deal with.ĬONAN: The identity, being black, the contingency being you can't swim at that pool except on Wednesdays.ĬONAN: And you write later in the book that, in fact, had someone sat you down at that age and said son, let me tell you about discrimination, that you would have listened politely for a little while. So if we were going to swim that summer in that pool, we would have to go only on Wednesday afternoons. And the conversation came up that gee, we couldn't go to the swimming pool that was three or so blocks away, in a white neighborhood, and that we'd have to except on Wednesday afternoon. So you're always cautious, but to the best of my ability, it was one day, the last day of school, second or third grade, coming home with kids in the neighborhood. And to the best of my ability, we psychologists know that memory is a construction. STEELE: Well, as I begin the book with the story of trying to remember when I first became aware I was African-American. CLAUDE STEELE (Author, "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us"): Great to be here.ĬONAN: And let me ask you to start with your realization of your own social identity, when you were a kid going to the swimming pool.ĭr. Nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION today.ĭr. His book is called "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affects Us." He joins us from our bureau in New York City. Later in the hour, actor, producer and now Broadway director Stanley Tucci joins us to talk about his new revival of the 1989 farce "Lend me a Tenor." But first, Claude Steele. Email us, You can also join the conversation on our Web site. How did you overcome it, if you did? Give us a call, 80. So call and tell us what situations you've had to deal with in which your social identity and the expectations that come along with it presented a challenge. He also lays out a plan to minimize the impact. It's a phenomenon social psychologist Claude Steele calls the stereotype threat, and his new book looks at the many and surprising ways that these expectations affect our lives. Take away the threat to their identity, and they'll do fine. And then there's a curious fact: When confronted with those negative stereotypes, female math majors do perform worse on tests, and white jumpers fail to clear the usual bar. We all know that women can't compete with men at higher math. And each of those identities comes along with a set of expectations or stereotypes. Our social identities come from a lot of places: our race, our sex, our age, our political affiliations, our medical diagnoses, our high schools, colleges, our favorite baseball teams.
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