Young is particularly excited about weaving themes from the “RACE” exhibition, at Skokie’s Holocaust Museum from October 2014 through January 2015, into One Book programming. Young is associate chair of the theatre department and holds appointments in African American studies in the Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences and in theatre, performance studies and radio/television/film in the School of Communication. “With its emphasis on race, identity and the effects of stereotypes on behavior and performance, Steele’s remarkable book should generate meaningful discussions of race and difference,” said 2014-15 One Book faculty chair Harvey Young. It also points to evidence that often small, feasible interventions can reduce these threats and dramatically narrow the racial and gender achievement gaps that, in Steele’s words, so discouragingly characterize our society. “Whistling Vivaldi” is about the experience of living under the cloud of the stereotype threat and the role such threats play in shaping individuals’ lives and society. And that stress distracts them from the task at hand and, in turn, from completing the task to the best of their ability. In experiment after experiment, Steele has found that people’s fears of confirming a negative stereotype - that white men can’t jump, that African Americans are intellectually inferior or that females can’t do high-level math - cause stress. The “stereotype threat” occurs when a person is in a situation that evokes negative stereotypes about the group to which he or she belongs. What “Whistling Vivaldi’s” author finds instructive about Staples’ story is its illustration of the power of what Steele, in decades of research, has dubbed the “stereotype threat.” And Steele by no means suggests that the targets of negative stereotypes adopt the culture of those who stereotype them. In a single stroke, Steele writes, Staples successfully distanced himself from the stereotype of the violence-prone black man and relieved both his own discomfort and that of people he passed.īut such a strategy comes at a price. He would whistle Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Beatles’ tunes as he walked at night. To countervail the stereotype of African-American males as prone to violence, Staples adopted an unusual strategy. “Couples locked arms or reached for each other’s hand when they saw me,” he wrote. It takes its unusual name from a story told to the author by Brent Staples, an African-American journalist who writes for The New York Times.Īs a graduate student walking at night in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Staples came to realize he was a source of distress for many of the white people he passed. “Whistling Vivaldi” is a summary of Steele’s groundbreaking research on group identity and the ways in which stereotypes can undermine the performance of the people they target. To enhance programming around the 2014-15 One Book selection and its themes, Northwestern has joined the YWCA Evanston/North Shore and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in presenting a widely praised traveling exhibition on race and identity titled “RACE: Are We So Different?” Norton’s “Issues of Our Time” series of books by leading thinkers exploring ideas that matter in the new millennium. The One Book initiative is the University’s community reading program.Ī highly readable, first-person account, “Whistling Vivaldi” by Claude Steele was published in 2010 as part of publisher W.W. “Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do” by one of the nation’s preeminent social psychologists has been chosen as the 2014-15 One Book One Northwestern University selection.
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