August 2026
Steele had just walked through a parent-teacher conference in which both sides are worried about how their identity will be read by the other. His argument is that the discomfort belongs to diverse settings themselves rather than to prejudice. Remove the prejudice, he says, and the tension survives, only attached to different identities in a different society.
Transcript
as they arrive, they're full of churn. And the teacher, for her part, is also full of churn. She's worried that, you know, she's committed to her students and she tries to be sensitive to the needs of minority students. And she's been at this for a long time. But she knows that if she says something that could be even slightly challenging or negative, that she could be seen in terms of the negative stereotypes in our society about her identity, which is that she's racist. And that would just be so distressing to have that befall her. So she's coming into the meeting. Oh, how can I, what can I say? What can I not say? So here we are. We're in this American drama because of the images of these identities that are in the air, so to speak, and that are relevant in this situation. And this situation is important. If they were just two, you know, meeting, if they were just strangers on a subway car, who cares? It would be of no emotional significance. But this is an important meeting. The stakes are felt strongly by both parties. And that makes this churn intense, preoccupying, enough to interfere with how well they functioned in that meeting. And also, interestingly, it really isn't coming from prejudice, they're prejudices. It has nothing to do with that. If you were prejudiced or unprejudiced, you'd feel this churn in this society to the same degree. Talk about that. Why
is that the
case? Well, it's because the stress, the pressure here for both groups is that they're at risk of being devalued in this setting based on their identities. So that's what they're dealing with, is that threat of just being given the stereotypes and the images that they know about how their group can be seen in this society. Oh, my goodness, this is a place where I could be seen in this way. And that's identity threat. They're just experiencing in this meeting, identity threat. If both parties were of the same race, black teacher, black parents, it probably wouldn't be a big deal because they can be pretty secure then that they won't be seen by another group member in terms of the worst stereotypes of that group. And the teacher, if it was just all whites involved here, wouldn't be so worried that she's the whole idea of being racist is irrelevant to that kind of a conversation. So I wanted to draw out the fact that this is in a society like ours, this is an inherent challenge of diversity itself, of integration. And that's part of what's challenging about it is that we can worry in important situations where we have to come together, workplaces, classrooms, doctor-patient relationships, traffic stops. We can worry that, oh my goodness, based on my identity, I could be really seen or treated in a terrible way here. And I got to be careful. And so all of a sudden, this diverse experience is making me uncomfortable and threatening. And I guess I've just seen so much of this in both my own experiences and also coming from my research on stereotype threat. Just the sense of being under the threat of being seen and treated stereotypically. I've seen it. I've seen it in the laboratory. I've seen it in real life. And so it occurred to me somewhere along the way that so it really, the tension between us isn't really all about prejudice. If you took a magic wand and just waved it and got rid of all prejudice in this society, you'd still have this particular tension. In another society, they'd have it too, but it'd be around different issues, different stereotypes, different identity threats. But in our society, this racial one or this gender one or this social class one or this sexual orientation one, these identities have this kind of significance when we bring people together, when we try to diversify or to integrate a setting as we used to call it.
Yeah, thank you. Well said. That was just beautifully said. You were talking, you mentioned a couple of words. You talked about situations and predicaments. And we talk a lot in behavioral science about how context matters, the importance of context in our behaviors and how our behavior changes because of different contexts. And then you actually brought up this example of if the parent-teacher conference between these two people or these three people might have happened not in a classroom, but maybe just a casual subway thing, it might not have mattered. Why is that? Why does context matter so much in these churn situations?
Yeah, yes. I think that the thing that the flame underneath churn that makes it intense, makes it burn, so to speak, is the importance of the situation. So if it's not important to the person, you know, we're just sitting next to each other in a basketball game, and I'm never going to see that person again. Oh, well, so they got their views. I don't know. I don't care. What's the score? We're not paying attention to that. But where my fate is involved, I'm in a traffic stop. And I know what could happen here. It's that same worry about how I'm going to be seen or the same idea that I could be seen in terms of negative stereotypes of my group. That can be very frightening in that situation. Or if I'm a student in a classroom. And my teacher isn't going to see that they're going to, if my teacher is going to really believe in my failures and really doubt my successes, and I really want to be a good student, I want to succeed in life, I want to be a member, belong in this school, that could be a very daunting experience to have to endure over a long, prolonged period of time. It could really affect how I function, how I feel, and my ability to engage the work of the classroom or the workplace and so on. So I guess my work in this book and the book preceding it on stereotype threat is to try to draw out the nature of this threat in the air that can come from images of our group that we just wander into a situation where those images are irrelevant and all of a sudden we know we could be seen in terms of them.
Yeah. And you're not posing a sort of a pollyannish. We can just ameliorate all this