Whistling Vivaldi

The book gets its title from a story a black New York Times writer, Brent Staples, told Steele about how he ad to whistle Vivaldi anytime he walked on the streets of Hyde Park a suburb of Chicago so he wouldn’t look violent to the dominantly white people who lived on that part. Staples who knew he had a social identity because he was black used the whistling to steer through that part of his daily life.
Identity contingencies are the things you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given social identity. Stereotype threat in the book, from my understanding can thus be defined as when a person finds himself/herself in situation or circumstance where his or her performance/behavior consciously or unconsciously is affected usually by negative stereotypes.
A typical example was the Golf experiment in the book where Jeff stone and his team using typical stereotypes about whites been less naturally athletic than blacks and blacks been less intelligent than whites as the experimental variables was able to prove how the performance of the white students at Princeton University was reduced when they were told they were been tested or their natural athletic ability and how the same thing happened to the black students when they were told they were been tested for their sports strategic intelligence.

The 2nd experiment Steele describes was the experiment in which a third grade teacher Jane Elliot trying to teach her students the importance of the life and works of Dry Martin Luther King identified eye color as the basis Of been smarter, cleaner and been well behaved. This experiment exemplified how an identity and stereotype affects a person’s way of thinking and ability.