c6-stereotype-threat

The material, statistics, data and thought that has been put forth by Dr. Claude Steele through his research into the Stereotype Threat is astounding. Monumental might be a better word. I never thought about this idea before, hell, never even knew it existed. The idea that someone’s performance is affected by a fear of confirming a stereotype and theory of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype is powerful and shocking. I have found this blog post to be nearly impossible to write because of the scope of this concept.

I’ve found myself thinking about past situations in my life to try and answer the questions from the guideline for this assignment. More often than not I discover myself losing hours of the day considering what went on in those situations. What I may have been thinking about another individual? How did my thinking affect that individual? What were they thinking of me? About themselves? How did this interaction affect the situation that we were in?

This topic is incredibly large and powerful. The stereotype threat is ever present, it reaches across all levels of socioeconomic standing, all races, all religions, all groups that feel that they can be seen as a group that has some preconceived stereotype about them. None of us can escape it, whether we are conscious of its presence or not. I feel like I have been asked to look back upon a lifetime of interactions with people and quantify not only how I have felt in those situations, but to also quantify how other people were affected by what they thought I may have perceived about them.

After wrestling over this assignment for a few days, I think I would rather have been asked to time box one hour to explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity through producing a working time machine. I find it ridiculous to try to sum up this material and if I have seen it in my life within an hour’s worth of time, much less a month.

What I am trying to get at is that yes, I certainly identify with the concept of the Stereotype Threat. I can see where I was affected by it in past performance and where I embodied it to effect the performance of others. I’m sure I asked myself a ton of questions, I’m sure anyone else who felt the threat also asked a ton of questions. Whether or not we all can identify it, we felt it physically. We would not have been affected otherwise.

The point is that I feel there’s no point to dwelling on the how the Stereotype Threat may have worked on me and others in my past experiences. What matters is how I can deal with the Stereotype Threat in the future. How I can keep my performance from being affected by it and how I can keep it from affecting others.

Easier said than done.

How are we supposed to protect everyone from the worries they may have or the threats they may feel about how they fit into a stereotype that I may or may not subscribe to? Should all the sharp corners that the difficulty of life exposes be rounded down to be safe? Should every challenge come with a set of instructions and a solution to check against? Should every hard surface be padded so that when you get knocked on your ass it doesn’t hurt so bad? What we all need to overcome the stereotype threat and to work beyond it is a sense of empowerment: an empowered sense of self and identity.

Somewhere at some point we all see ourselves as a group, maybe even a part of many groups. With many people come many groups and many points of view. Humans are competitive by nature and there’s no way to stop one group from looking at another in a negative light. Consequently there’s no way of one group knowing that they are seen in a negative way by others. An individual can be a part of any or all of these groups, but in the end the individual is a single being made up from pieces of those groups they feel they belong to.

In order not to ramble on about bits and pieces, the point is that we need to cultivate the idea of individuality as important above all else. An individual may be a member of a certain ethnic group, may have a certain skin color, may be of a certain sex or whatever else, but until the individual is taught to believe that those traits provide no more bearing on their abilities than the color of their hair, they are allowing the Stereotype Threat to work its way into their performance. Until we can all be empowered as individuals who’s worth is based upon our performance and not our membership to a specific group we are going to be chased by the stereotype threat. At some point it has to be brought to light that these stereotypes are based in bullshit generalizations, so why subscribe to them in the first place?

Is it really important if someone thinks a mistake you made is because of your skin color? Or religious creed? Or sex? In my opinion that's their problem. It only is important if you believe in that stereotype yourself. The problem lies not with people who may embody a stereotype with their actions, but to the people who believe in the stereotype in the first place. We error because we are human, not because we have genitalia that sticks out or in. We error because we are human, not because our skin is dark or light. We error because we are human, not because we believe in a sense of the ineffible that someone else doesn’t.

So then how to keep my performance from being affected by it and how to keep it from affecting others?

I think the answer to this question ultimately comes through recongition and respect. There has to be a self recognition in who I am, where I come from and who I want to become. There has to be a respect for the other individuals I encounter; a respect for them, their ideas/opinions, and their sense of identity as an indivual. There has to be a recognition of each individual and a respect for what they bring to the table, because it's ultimately those outside thoughts that teach us about who we are as well as who the other individual is. Each viewpoint from an individual is important because we could never come up with the same thought ourselves on account of the fact that different and very specific pieces of background compose our individual beliefs. For a welcoming environment and a reduction, if not hopeful abolishment, of the Sterotype Threat this idea of respect and recognition must become a constant cycle between myself and others that drives growth and development. We all have to learn to recognize that the ideas we encounter which lay outside our own individual make up are important for just that fact. None of us are going to grow or learn anything new without each other to provide an outside influence.