Claude Steele was born and raised in Chicago. His mother, a social worker, and his father, a truck driver, raised him to value hard work, and education. As he grew older, his interest was piqued by the fledgling civil rights movement. He became an activist, and marched many times, trying to effect change, feeling empowered by finding his voice. His main academic interest was psychology, and subsequently social psychology.
Whitling Vivaldi was Steele's first published book, and in it the author references many of the most pivotal events in the civil rights movement. His childhood, in 1950s Chicago, was largely in a world segregated by race; his interest in civil rights spring-boarded when he was refused entry into a whites only public swimming pool. He never forgot the way this made him feel, but he also came to believe that this segregation was less about ignorance, and more about stereotyping. He developed his view over his years as a professor at the University of Michigan, and concluded that a fear of either acting like a stereotype oneself, or encountering someone who will act exactly like their gender or ethnic stereotype, is far more of an influencer to behavior than previously believed.
The book traces Steele's work on the effects of stereotyping from the late 1950s to the months shortly after Barrack Obama's election, The studies that Steele produced are often likened to those of Malcolm Gladwell, particularly in his book The Tipping Point, in which he postulates that small, imperceptible social cues have more effect on human behavior than seminal events or traumatic experiences.
The book was well received, and as a result Steele received a plethora of honorary doctorates from some of the nation's most respective colleges, including Princeton and Yale. Unfortunately, towards the end of his academic career Steele succumbed to somewhat of a social stereotype himself - the male professor who will not take female students' claims of sexual harassment within the department faculty seriously. He stepped down from his position of Provost at the University of California, Berkley, in 2016.
