White Fragility, Stereotype Threat, and How Not to Do DEI

In 1995, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson published some research postulating that one contributing factor in racial achievement gaps was a thing they called stereotype threat. They theorized that performance can be affected by the expectation that you are being evaluated according to a stigmatized category that you belong to (or even that you are believed to belong to) that carries a stereotype of being less capable at the task you are doing. You then underperform, meaning you do worse than you would if the stereotype threat were not present. It is one of the most researched explanations of test score gaps along far more lines than race at this point. Ten years ago a survey article counted more than 300 studies done on the phenomenon. Not all of them have accepted it as a central explanation of achievement gaps, but the overwhelming consensus at this point is that stereotype threat is a real phenomenon, and it certainly can affect performance, In a field like social psychology where increasing attention has been given to problems with replicating results in further studies, stereotype threat is actually one of the most replicated results you will find. I have to say that I initially thought the idea was ridiculous when I first heard it about 20 years ago, but it seems pretty well confirmed at this point. There is no denying that the anxiety about being labeled as bad in some way can affect someone's performance in areas of complete competence. There is a real effect on executive function and cognitive processing that comes from such anxiety. (Incidentally, actual researchers looking into the achievement gap on the left and right have been converging toward accepting each other's explanations as partial explanations of the phenomenon. It's an interesting case of depolarization in academia while society gets more polarized.)

I taught Geoffrey Cohen's excellent book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connections and Bridging Divides this past semester. He gives a really interesting example of stereotype threat that flips all the expected categories. He describes an event in the life of Eminem that sure seems like an example of stereotype threat. Before Eminem was successful, he showed up for a competition of some sort for rappers, completely ready to perform. Some people then told him that because he's white he'll never be a good rapper. That triggered stereotype threat in him, which induced enough anxiety to affect his ability to do the thing that he has proved himself perfectly capable of doing in his subsequent career. He got up on that stage and just couldn't do it. Stereotype threat can occur when the marginalized or stereotyped identity is normally in the majority if in some smaller context that identity is in fact stereotyped and associated with lower performance. This is a really good case of that.

He then gives another example of stereotype threat among white people that blew my mind. He thinks the observations that Robin DiAngelo has made about white people having difficulty engaging with race-conscious people on issues of race, which she calls white fragility, provide an example of stereotype threat among white people. These interactions trigger the stereotype of white people being racists, and they then underperform in their ability to engage in conversation. They fail to see important distinctions. They think they are being accused of being racists when someone is merely pointing to unconscious behavior or systemic forces in society. They can't hear what's actually being said, and then they misrepresent it pretty badly. This is a phenomenon I have witnessed countless times in conversations online, so I was intrigued by the idea.

Read More