Summary

In Chapter 5, “The Many Experiences of Stereotype Threat” Steele recounts the experience of a white student who took an African-American politics class in college and experienced the effects of being a minority for the first time in his life. While he felt nervous about confirming stereotypes and became reluctant to say anything people could read deeply into, he saw his black classmates light up in a way they did not in classes in which they were in the minority. After talking him about what he took away from this experience, Steele and his colleagues then set out to design an experiment that would introduce a stereotype pressure to a group that did not usually experience it. When they told a group of “exceptionally strong white male math students” (92) that Asians usually did better than whites on the math test they were taking, they...