Claude Steele begins the book by recalling his childhood days in 1950s Chicago, specifically detailing the day that he first realized he was black. Steele tried to enter a public swimming pool but was not permitted to; because he was black and the pool was for white people only. Steele believes it is significant that he was made aware of his skin color, and its importance in his life, not by looking in the mirror or by his parents, but by a negative, outside force who turned him away from a public facility purely because of his color. Steele's research compiled over twenty years contends that the threat of a stereotype is so powerful and appeals so strongly to our subconscious that it can actually influence the way we behave, even when we don't realize it.
In the 1980s, Steele was beginning his career as a professor at the University of Michigan, and was noticing rather a large gap in achievements between white and black students. Black students tended to underperform on tests, and spent the majority of their time with other black students. They also felt they were treated patronizingly by their professors, or seen as second class citizens. Steele was inspired to design a series of experiments that would measure the influence that stereotypes have on human behavior. There were many of his peers at the time who believed it to be possible that certain groups of people would be considered less smart purely based on genetics. Along with a fellow professor, Steven Spencer wanted to test this hypothesis, even though he didn't actually believe it himself. The two suggested that the threat of conforming to a stereotype would distract minority students, and they would get so nervous about proving themselves intellectually inferior that they would struggle to pass an exam. When women were told to take a math test that was said to measure intellectual capabilities they performed far worse than men, yet when they were just given the test, and no reference was made to gender performance or results, they performed at the same level as men. They interpreted the results to mean that the threat of doing badly and proving that women conform to the stereotype of being bad at math actually became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Although the results did seem to agree with the professors' original hypothesis they decided that far more research was needed before any conclusions could be drawn, so they developed the idea further to include other groups of students. Black students only underperformed on tests when they were told that they would be taking a test that measured intellectual capacity. Another group of researchers were also working on similar hypotheses, and conducted experiments with Asian Americans, working-class people, and seniors, who were all groups whose stereotypical intellectual capacities were lower than other members of the population.
Steele's picture of stereotyping began to look very different to the majority of psychological studies. Generally sociologists argued that constantly being stereotyped actually made minorities feel less motivated, but Steele argued that stereotypes were more like a self fulfilling prophecy and only affected specific groups when they were threatened by a situation that they knew might validate this stereotype; when circumstances of the test-taking changed, so did the results and the performance of the subjects. At the same time other sociologists were postulating that humans have an inbuilt need to divide everyone into groups, and also like to spend time with people similar to themselves.
The second half of the book looks at the ways in which teachers can eliminate the effects of stereotypes on their students. One of the key ways in which they could do this was to focus on the hard work that had been done and the knowledge they know that they have, and to accept that there are stereotypes but ignore them. Gradually, studies showed that something simple, such as affirmations, made a difference; instructing students to tell themselves "I am intelligent" or "My results are a product of my hard work" enabled minorities to break through their fear of performing true to stereotype.
The final portion of the book deals with post-Obama America. Many claimed that this would also be "post racial America" but Steele saw things rather differently. He suggested that Americans should not try do deny their racial heritage or pretend that racial identity does not play a key role within the communities themselves, but rather that by understanding that whilst their own experiences play a role in their identity so do the experiences of others. Stereotypes affect everyone in some way and if this is accepted as a fact, rather than as something that needs to be changed, the achievement gap might finally be closed.
