Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Claude, what exactly is “stereotype threat”? And why does it matter for the intellectual performance of Black youth at school?

Claude M. Steele: Stereotype threat is a very simple experience that everybody has, I believe, a couple times a day. It refers to being in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities—your age, your race, your gender—is relevant to you. You know then that you could be seen and treated in terms of that stereotype. And if you care about what you're doing, the prospect of being judged and treated this way can be upsetting, distracting, and can interfere with your functioning in the situation.

There are thousands of examples of this. I remember being a psychology department chair. The department, for a period, got moved administratively so that we had to report to a natural science dean rather than a social science dean. During my first couple of meetings with the new natural science dean, I presented psychology as the hardest-edge science—you know, as big science [laughter]. As you know, I'm a social psychologist, and we don't really have that many big science, big equipment needs. So, one time, I came out and said, “why am I presenting psychology that way?” Perhaps it was a comfort to myself, but the answer was stereotype threat. I worried that at some implicit level (while not being fully aware of it) this dean (a chemist in this case) could be looking at psychology—not my race, not my age, but my discipline—as a soft science. And in the competition for resources, that might be used against my department. So that's a good example of a stereotype threat, and since it's outside the race domain, you can see how general the phenomenon is.

If you're a member of a group whose intellectual abilities are broadly looked down upon—you can read about the problems your group has in intellectual domains in the newspaper on a regular basis—then when you're in a situation where you're performing on an intellectual test, or in a conversation with a professor or a teacher, or in a whole host of similar situations, you could experience stereotype threat. And the distraction and disruption of your thinking caused by it could interfere with your performance in the situation. That's the idea.

Gates: Does it obtain throughout life? Let's say, hypothetically, that one was an African American and she or he were the first [Black] provost at an Ivy League school—would stereotype threat visit itself upon one in that situation?

Steele: Yes. I think it can. It's interesting. If you're famous and renowned for your intellectual prowess, like, say, Professor Gates [laughter]…

Gates: Like Cornel West [laughter].

Steele: Or Cornel West. OK, we'll pick on somebody not here [laughter]. You can be confident that a lot of people you meet will know this fact about you and thus not judge you in terms of the stereotype about your group's intelligence. You could be a very distinguished professor, let's say, and everybody in your field could know who you are, but you walk across the hall to another department where they don't know who you are, and they could see you as an affirmative action baby. And you know it. You know that they could see you that way. You have a sense that “I'm not well enough known here for my reputation to deflect that possibility. I could be judged this way.” And there it is again. Now you could have tremendous skills at performing under pressure anyway. I'm not saying this is a completely defeating pressure. But if you face it in a situation where you're trying to move up the educational ladder and your high intelligence is not well known—you're a student trying to progress, for example—you're often competing at the frontier of your skills, where work is frustrating and you're under a lot of pressure. That's where I think this extra pressure can have serious consequences for a person.

Gates: Well, Claude, why wouldn't we convene a meeting of very influential African American professors and just decide to hypnotize the Talented Tenth, because it's “just” an attitude? [laughter] And I put “just” in quotes, because I know—

Steele: See, you're not a psychologist. This thing you call “just,”—that's what we make a living figuring out [laughter].

Gates: Why don't we just hypnotize the Negroes, hypnotize the stereotype threat away, because it's only in our heads?

Steele: Ah, well see—

Gates: Isn't it?

Steele: No. I have spent a lot of time trying to make something clear for people. I'm not talking about internalized self-doubts and self-hatreds—the classic “psychic damage,” to borrow a term from historian Daryl Michael Scott. He's got a beautiful book out on this. But it's not an internalized doubt, which is an old Du Bois notion. That's not what I'm talking about. That happens where you're raised in a society that stigmatizes your group and you internalize that negative feeling about yourself and about your group. I'm not talking about that. I'm really talking about a simple social psychological situation of intersubjectivity. For me to communicate with you, I have to have some conception of how your mind works and how you think—what you could think about what I say and what you mean when you say this or that. Stereotype threat is a simple outgrowth of that kind of inter-subjective awareness—one mind having some conception of how another mind will respond—that we need to communicate as human beings on a very basic level. As a member of this society, I know that if I ask you to give me a ride home that your mind will know what I am talking about. I have an implicit theory of how your mind works that tells me that you will understand me. Also, as a member of this society, I know that your mind knows a number of negative stereotypes about the discipline of psychology, say, and that if you wanted to—or even without thinking about it very much—you could judge me in terms of those bad stereotypes. If we were in a situation or relationship where I thought that was likely, then I would feel the pressure of possibly being judged that way. And since my being a psychologist is important to me, I could be uncomfortable by the prospect of your doing that. That is stereotype threat—and that is how it grows out of our inter-subjective awareness of how the people around us think. The point here is that all of this could happen without me having a self doubt in the world about psychology, or about being a psychologist. I could be uncomfortable under the risk of this judgment without having any doubts about that identity at all. In this way, stereotype threat is a situational threat of judgment or mistreatment and not an internalized doubt. And that is why we can't just hold hands and agree that, you know, we Black people should just disregard stereotype threat about our race. It can be a real threat, with real—sometimes profound—consequences.

Much of our coping with this threat is unconscious, beneath our awareness. Knowing that people could think of me in terms of negative stereotypes about my race's sophistication or intelligence, I might, for example, unconsciously do things to deflect that perception—wear a tie when I travel, make sure my shoes are well shined, etc. I could do a whole host of things which, out in public, are going to deflect people from seeing me in terms of those negative stereotypes. And many of these things you just do implicitly, without thinking about it.

Gates: Whistling Vivaldi?

Steele: You have to whistle Vivaldi.

Gates: And that's the title of your new book, quoting the famous Brent Staples essay.

Steele: Yes, that's right.

Gates: But isn't that just too much to ask of us? Isn't it like being forced to work overtime all the time?

Steele: Well, we do. There are some circumstances where stereotype threat is going to be much more of a factor than in other circumstances—situations where the likelihood of being seen stereotypically seems high—in the case of an older person trying to remember where he put his tax forms, for example. And other situations where the likelihood of being stereotyped seems very low—when the stereotyped groups, say Blacks and lawyers, are among themselves. When we (Blacks) are just among ourselves, for example, we're often not too afraid of being stereotyped by others.

Gates: Go to the barber shop, we stereotype each other all day long [laughter].

Steele: Yeah, that's the air we breathe in that situation [laughter]. But it's when we're transacting with the out group that the stakes become significant. If the stakes are not significant, who cares? But when the stakes are significant, and when it's a persistent feature of your life in a situation that you've got to deal with in order to survive and thrive—like a workplace, or in a school classroom or standardized test—then stereotype threat becomes a significant factor.

Gates: So what do we do about it? Evelyn Higginbotham and I teach a course on the great debates in the African American tradition. And it's a lot of fun. So I could imagine adding a unit on stereotype threat. One person would say we have to teach our non-Black colleagues that this exists, that they have to change their attitudes and change the environment in which we function. On the other hand, from my point of view, we would have to hypnotize Black people. And I'm being funny, of course. But somehow we have to get this idea out of their minds, if that's possible to do.

Steele: Well, I think one thing that might fit the kind of thing you're talking about is to teach people about it. I think if you know about it, that's a first step toward reducing its impact in critical situations. Because then you may know how you feel and why you feel that way. And if you know why you seem to feel the way you do in that situation, you can get past it a little bit. It's not a question of knowing about it and then having an unexplained uncomfortable feeling—that's what amplifies the whole experience. But if you know about it, you can defang it a little bit.

Gates: That's a good point.

Steele: It's just like any kind of self-knowledge. It helps you deal with the situation you're facing. In most of the research that's been done, they've focused on what factors make it really strong in a situation. Integration makes it strong. Being a tiny minority in a situation, for anybody, can make stereotype or identity threat a strongly-felt threat. Or having no value placed on diversity—in a very homogeneous setting. These are situational factors that can make this threat strong.

I believe this is one of the most compelling arguments for diversity in a school or work place: when there are a variety of ways of being that are valued and that function well in a situation, then people with minority identities in the situation can feel like they can belong and maybe succeed. For example, my own research with colleagues such as Valerie Purdy-Vaughns and Mary Murphy points over and over again to the importance of “critical mass.” If you are in a very tiny minority—you're the only old person in this company, or the only man in this company—then you get preoccupied with your identity. You're constantly calculating whether it's a factor in the transactions you have. It becomes something that can absorb your cognitive capacities—weigh down your thinking and your functioning—because it becomes something you're constantly doing. Well, as soon as you add a certain critical mass—another person with the same identity as yours—that stops. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor said it was like night and day. All of a sudden she was a normal person. Before that one other person was there, before the other woman was there, she felt like she was just under a microscope all the time. Reporters were following her into restaurants, combing over every decision for what would be the woman's point of view. As soon as two women were on the Court, it became nearly a non-issue.

Gates: That's one reason I'm hoping President Obama appoints another Black person to the Supreme Court, to neutralize Clarence Thomas [laughter]. But anyway—

Steele: That's an editorial comment, is that what you're saying?

Gates: Indeed.

Steele: Because that has nothing to do with [laughter] stereotype threat.

Gates: Clarence is a stereotype threat [laughter].

Steele: Well, Clarence Thomas I think is under stereotype threat. This whole business about him not talking in the Court.

Gates: Oh, absolutely.

Steele: I think that's the simplest account of that.

Gates: I think he has a profound inferiority complex.

Steele: Well, see, I wouldn't even go so far as to attribute that to him, because I'm sticking to my theoretical story here right now. You could be correct, I don't know. But it's sufficient to look at the intense stereotype threat that he's under. He's the only Black person there, fearful he's going to fall off, as he says, into some geechee dialect or something of that sort, and what he'd have to deal with as a consequence of that.

Gates: Yeah, but Thurgood Marshall did not seem to care what White people thought of him. One of Thurgood Marshall's favorite words had twelve letters and began with an “m.” He did not care. So what's the difference between Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas? I have to confess that it's difficult for me actually to imagine a child sitting down to take a standardized exam and saying, “Oh my God, what are White people going to think of the race if I don't score well?” I have such a hard time believing that that actually happens.

Steele: Well, let me see if I describe it to you this way—

Gates: OK.

Steele: —and see whether you'd have the same doubt. If you're talking about a Black kid, for example, who really isn't identified with school, doesn't care much about school, then the possibility of not performing well and being judged stereotypically in school doesn't bother him that much because he no longer cares about school. You have to care in order to experience this threat. Caring about the area where your group is stereotyped is what opens you up to the threat. Then when you are under this threat your blood pressure is elevated. You start to sweat. Activity in your prefrontal cortex is suppressed. The amygdala, which picks up threat in the situation, is activated. You are going through something here. But if you ask people whether they feel anxious, they often say no. It's like our insensitivity to hypertension.

Gates: That's interesting. But, before we go on to that, what's the difference between Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas?

Steele: One difference could be that Thurgood Marshall got on the Supreme Court in the traditional way, by having performed so well for so long that everybody knew how smart he was.

Gates: He was the Michael Jordan of the law.

Steele: —phenomenal figure.

Gates: Right.

Steele: So when he's on the Supreme Court, it's not rational for him to think that people are going to judge him through that racial stereotype about lower intellectual ability. It's that inter-subjectivity again. Clarence Thomas got there another way [laughter]. And it could be completely more rational for him to think that he could be judged stereotypically—as not up to the job. I'm being frank, because some research does indeed point in this direction. Skin color, dialect, lack of prior experience, things of this sort—these are features that would make it more rational for you to expect that you might be seen stereotypically if you wound up in a position as distinguished and visible as the Supreme Court.

Gates: I'm intrigued by this phenomenon, even if it's hard for me to understand, because I love taking tests so much. My whole life I've done well on standardized tests and been rewarded for it. So when you and I first started talking about your theory, I found myself thinking, “Do I really believe that this is true?” In my case, I know it's not that I'm free of being condescended to. I feel condescension intuitively; I have an instinct for it—and I rebel against its presence. I respond to it as soon as I feel it. I know when a person is treating me in a racist way. And I know if they're attempting to put me down through a matter of intellect. But what I do is I fight back in some sort of way. And I am sure you do as well.

Steele: I want to just interrupt you there to say that the detriment in performance comes from the attempt to disprove the stereotype. It doesn't come from giving up. It comes from the person saying “I'm going to beat this thing,” because the person cares about it. They don't want to be seen that way. And it's that extra over-effort that causes all that physiological reactivity.

Gates: Let's reflect on that. As you know, your father and my father are very similar. One of my father's favorite sayings was “You got to be ten times smarter than the White boy.” And I'm sure you heard that a thousand times, just like I did. Well, that's why you're sitting up here, provost at Columbia University. But there's a difference. And Thurgood Marshall, God rest his soul, would have said that the reason he was who he was is because he knew he had to be better than the White guys he was fighting to defeat segregation using the legal system. That seems to me to be a positive force.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: A negative force would be when one perspires, one uses linguistic hyper-correction, one is so dizzy with doubt because of what these people are going to think of you. What's the difference between using these doubts about African Americans to propel you, to make you stay up late, do the Abraham Lincoln thing with the candle, and say “I'm going to master physics?” and on the other hand, internalizing it so much that it makes you crazy? And you end up doing worse than doing better.

Steele: Yeah. Again, I resist the term internalizing.

Gates: OK. Let me say to our readers, I am a literary critic, not a social scientist!

Steele: And maybe this distinction means more to me because I'm a social psychologist.

Gates: Perhaps.

Steele: And I'm trying to talk about the social context and its impact on the person.

Gates: So what does “internalize” mean for you as a psychologist?

Steele: Internalization has been the classic story about African Americans, women and Jews. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was a common explanation of the Jewish experience—an experience where you internalize a certain stereotype. Where you believe it. You know, when you actually believe that Black people are inferior.

Gates: And you don't believe that's true, that some people do?

Steele: I do believe that people do internalize it. But I'm trying to say there's another thing people hadn't thought about. And what's interesting about it is that this other thing people hadn't thought about affects the vanguard of the group. It affects people who are really committed in that academic path. People in any classroom—it could be in the inner-city, it could be at Harvard—people who are really committed. That is what opens you up to this threat. It doesn't become an all-defeating thing. It becomes this extra thing you have to do deal with, navigate, and figure out throughout your life. You know, the fact that we African American professionals and academics like clothes—

Gates: I happen to love clothes.

Steele: We like cars.

Gates: I also love cars. But I'm not thinking about George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan when I go to buy a suit.

Steele: But you're thinking about everybody you encounter.

Gates: I'm thinking about—

Steele: You feel more secure [laughter].

Gates: No, I'm thinking about looking good.

Steele: Yeah, but look at your White colleagues. Do they dress like that?

Gates: No, but that's because they have no style or taste [laughter]. I'm Black. My mother was a seamstress. My mother was a clothes horse. The only reason I didn't stop and have my shoes shined coming to see you—

Steele: I know.

Gates: —was because of the traffic. This is the day of the ticker tape parade for the Yankees. And I couldn't get across town to my shoeshine place. My mother would expect me to have my shoes shined, and if she's looking down, she's probably not pleased that I am sitting in the office of the provost of Columbia University with my shoes unshined!

Steele: Yeah [laughter].

Gates: But I didn't do that for any White person. I don't see any White people around here, except the camera man over there [laughter]. I do that because I was raised with certain aesthetic values. And she would have felt the very same way if you had been the provost at Howard University or Spelman College.

Steele: Well, I'm glad you think of me that way [laughter].

Gates: It's just a matter of style.

Steele: You know, I don't want to get lost in these details but, for example, I remember a very distinguished African American academic. He said “look, whenever I fly I like put on a tie.” And I said, “really, you put on a tie every time you fly?” And he said, “yeah, I do.” He knows that that tie will help deflect being stereotyped—and not given the benefit of any doubt—when something goes wrong.

Gates: I understand that. But stereotype is not the sole motivation at all times for similar sorts of behavior.

Steele: He knew he could be seen a certain way and when he puts the tie on—it's worth it.

Gates: I spend a lot of time in airports and I think the best dressed people in an airport tend to be African Americans. We do tend to over-dress.

Steele: OK. So that's all I'm talking about.

Gates: I understand.

Steele: And where it also has its effect is on all these critical test performances—college entrance exams, graduate student entrance exams, law school exams, bar examinations—there you start to see these unexplained gaps. And in experiments, I can get rid of those gaps.

Gates: You can? By creating safe space?

Steele: By creating a safe space. Thus, relieving that pressure.

Gates: So can you quantify it? What small or large part of the achievement gap is attributable to stereotype threat?

Steele: Here's what I would say about that. I don't think that stereotype threat is the only significant cause of the achievement gap, but I don't think you can ever eliminate the achievement gap without eliminating stereotype threat. I think it is not the entire source of the achievement gap. There are still so many educational disadvantages that are tied to race and social class in this country. Those disadvantages—that greatly undermine Blacks' access to quality educational opportunities—have to be a huge component of any gap. You could call it, as some people do, an opportunity gap as much an achievement gap. But reducing that gap, eliminating it entirely—I think eliminating or reducing stereotype threat is necessary to do that. It may not be sufficient, but neither is the best instruction in the world sufficient to eliminate that gap without also reducing stereotype and identity threat in our schools.

Gates: OK. Well, let's talk about it in relationship to public policy. Let's say you're secretary of education—a logical move from the provost position at Columbia. I predict that, ladies and gentlemen [laughter]. How do you get school officials to take these ideas into account and fashion policies that defeat or minimize the role of stereotype threat?

Steele: Well, first let me say what I'd do if I was the secretary of education, if I had that kind of responsibility. At the top of my priority list would be the more equitable delivery of quality education in the United States. I think it's an illusion that people have equal access to even adequate education, let alone quality education. But it's a very thin illusion. In fact, people with resources pay huge amounts of money and go to great lengths to get every educational advantage for their children because they know that in the United States access to quality education is not equal. You really have to struggle to get it. It's a limited resource, not something that is broadly available. I would take that as my first priority, even though I'm a researcher identified with stereotype threat.

Now having said that, I believe there are obstacles at every step in the educational process, both for women in math and sciences and for groups whose abilities are negatively stereotyped in the broader society. The students in those groups who are the most school-identified are most vulnerable to this kind of stereotype and identity threat pressure. They're going to experience it on a regular basis. And there are certain things that really help to reduce it. Diversity reduces it. If you put them in school situations where they're the only ones and you just think you don't have to pay any attention, you're going to have the kind of frustrations that we've had. When you and I were kids in the 1960s, everybody thought that if you just integrated the schools all boats would rise—that these gaps and these group differences would go away. We've lived now another forty years to know that's not the case. This is a mystery for people's common sense to explain. Why are those gaps there? This is where the stereotype and identity threat analysis comes in. You have to have some sense of identity comfort in a situation to thrive in it. You have to feel comfortable in order to learn and prosper. I have to be in a situation where my prefrontal cortex is solely devoted to the educational task at hand, and not to some semi-conscious calculation about how people are regarding me and about what the consequences for my life will be at every turn in the road. So we have to—as best as possible—design education so that the threat is reduced, and one of the major ways of doing that is through diversity itself. But there are others.

Some of the research is amazing in this regard. Geoff Cohen, Julio Garcia, and Valerie Purdie-Vaughns have a series of papers in Science that I think are especially impressive. They studied several typical sixth grade classrooms in which African American students were a minority. They found a typical pattern: Black students might experience a little frustration and then, in light of the stereotypes about their group, they might worry more that they would be judged stereotypically or that they didn't belong. And this worry, in turn, would distract them and, over time, cause their performance to get still worse—ever widening the racial gap in grade performance.

They went in pretty early in the semester and allowed these kids to affirm things about their life that they valued, that gave meaning to their lives (often these were images of family members and friends) by writing about them in ways that affirmed their most important, self-defining values in life. Twenty minutes, just twenty minutes is all they were allowed to work on this. After they had done that though, the cues in this situation—cues that would normally make them feel stereotype threat such as frustration, their minority status, and the relevance of bad stereotypes about their group—seemed to be more easily dismissed as less relevant to them, as less threatening. And when this happened, their performance got a little better. Slightly better performance made the possibly threatening cues in the situation even less threatening, which in turn, improved their academic performance still more. And over the course of the year the gap is almost gone entirely. And the effect lasted for almost two years.

Gates: That's extraordinary.

Steele: So psychology does make a difference.

Gates: But let's go back to studying people who don't have it and people who do and doing a comparison. For example—

Steele: People who don't have what?

Gates: People who don't seem to be aware of or suffer from stereotype threat.

Steele: I would say that it's not so much about them, but that they're in a situation like Thurgood Marshall. Maybe he doesn't have it at the Supreme Court. The reason he doesn't have it is because he's been out there on the road, arguing cases before the court for years. He's built up a great deal of experience. He knows that people aren't seeing him that way. That's one reason I think I can function in this job, and that you can function in your job—it's that by the time we got here, we're known. So people aren't thinking of us that way. It's not plausible for us to think that we're being seen that way.

Gates: But I was thinking of Black immigrant children.

Steele: Yeah.

Gates: As opposed to indigenous, African American children.

Steele: You get very little stereotype threat effects among first generation immigrants, but you get them in second generation immigrants.

Gates: Because they become “Americans,” replete with psychological conditions induced by socialization?

Steele: They become Americans and they know how they could be seen. And they don't have, say, the same dialect, or maybe the same features. The social patterns that they know in the first generation will deflect their being seen stereotypically—“If people know this about me they're not going to see me in terms of this American racial stereotype.” But their kids don't have those same markers, so to speak. And they know they could be seen that way.

Gates: Let's talk about the achievement gap more broadly. We have a Black president, deeply committed to educational reform, at least rhetorically. Arnie Duncan is a very good man, a moral man, an energetic man, a person who wants to achieve genuine reform. First of all, what needs to happen? And secondly—and you can answer these in whatever order—are you optimistic or pessimistic that the Obama administration will make dramatic changes in the performance gap, the achievement gap?

Steele: I'm optimistic that they seem to be committed to putting real resources into education in a way that I think will distinguish this administration. I am optimistic that that will continue throughout the time of this administration. There's a lot more money there these days. I also think that they have a healthily pragmatic view—which I value. That is, this has been my experience with this research. I just would never have thought that these kinds of processes would be as critical as they are. I hope I've made clear in this interview that at certain junctures they're especially critical for kids who are really already pretty committed. And there are a lot of them, even in inner-city schools.

We did a study in inner-city Los Angeles. And this is a pretty disidentified set of students. We asked them, “how much do you care about schooling?” And we divided them in half, those kids that cared relatively more and those kids who cared relatively less. The kids who cared relatively more showed standard stereotype threat effects. They underperformed when the test was presented as a test of ability. And they performed a lot better when you told them the test was not a test of ability. For the kids who didn't care much about schooling, it didn't make any difference how you represented the test [laughter]. They didn't care about the test anyway. They didn't perform well. In our terms, they've already protectively disidentified with the whole domain.

Gates: Protectively disidentified.

Steele: So, where was I? Oh, we were with the Obama administration, in education. I do think it's a strong value for them. I hope that there's going to be a good portion of this money that goes to research, because I believe there is a lot to find out. I hope that they don't rely too heavily on high-stakes testing. I think stereotype threat becomes a real factor when you start talking about high-stakes testing, graduation tests and so on.

Gates: You mean the “leaving no child behind” kind of tests?

Steele: Yes.

Gates: And worse?

Steele: Yes. You've got to, because what they're going to find is that minority and poorer kids score lower on those tests—even when you have other indications that they are skilled and motivated. That is the basic “underperformance” phenomenon that started our research twenty years ago. There will then be pressure to get these students off of a school's books—so they don't bring down school-wide averages. These pressures will be a real factor in how schools respond to these students.

It's interesting. When we middle-class people think about educating our own kids, we think about an exciting, exploratory form of curriculum that ignites intrinsic interest and so on. When we think about inner-city kids though, we tend to think about a kind of top-down skill-oriented approach. These kids need to make up basic skills. But increasingly I think all kids need the same thing. I really believe the first model is better for inner-city kids too, and that the second model can be destructive. And if there's too much—

Gates: Remedial?

Steele: Remedial, top down—

Gates: Or rote?

Steele: Rote, skill-oriented. And it doesn't seem that some of the people who have a big voice in education today are enlightened about that distinction—

Gates: I had never thought about it. I think you're absolutely correct, particularly in a postmodern era of hip hop and—

Steele: Yes.

Gates: —of rapidly innovative and dramatically changing technology.

Steele: Yes. The same kid that is blowing the rote exam they're giving in the fifth grade is out there making up these incredibly creative hip hop lyrics.

Gates: Oh, absolutely.

Steele: Same kid. Same kid.

Gates: My father used to say that when he went into the Army in World War II, he knew all these Black men who couldn't read and write. He used to joke that they not only split infinitives, they split adverbs and adjectives [laughter]. But he said they could recite a thousand verses of Shine and the Titanic or The Signifying Monkey on the spot [laughter]. He said these very same people who couldn't read and write were enormously talented.

Steele: Yes indeed.

Gates: But there was a disconnect.

Steele: There was a disconnect. If they turn the schooling of these kids into that kind of thing, then they're going to continue to see this gap. The other reason this gap exists is that if you give kids tests early in their school lives, and then you assign them to different curricula based on those test scores, which tends to be what happens.

Gates: Inevitably.

Steele: And then you go six years down the road and you've given this kid one kind of education and this other kid a different kind of education—based on those early test scores—and you've got a gap between them, where do you think that gap came from?

Gates: Of course.

Steele: So there are structural things that create this gap.

Gates: It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without a doubt.

Steele: Yes, on the part of the schooling system.

Gates: What should be done to narrow the achievement gap? Can we do it through educational policy or is it a larger problem of economic structure? Would it exist if all the people who live in an inner-city collectively hit the lotto and moved to Scarsdale? Would the achievement gap disappear? How much, in other words, is socioeconomic? How much is the result of other factors?

Steele: Bill Wilson argues that ghettos are created through a concentration of multiple factors—there are migration patterns, jobs have moved out of the inner-city and they're less available—a whole concert of factors. Well, I think the achievement gap is another problem where that's exactly the right way to think about it. There are a variety of factors. And I think I'd begin to focus on, and I know the Obama administration is very interested in, early parenting. I would vote for that.

Gates: What's early parenting?

Steele: Where you're trying to get parents to play a more active role in reading to their kids, speaking to their kids, and socializing their kids toward the whole school experience.

Gates: I thought you meant it was referring to … a person having a child too early, which is a major social problem.

Steele: That's part of that problem.

Gates: Right.

Steele: I guess there's a movie out this week called Precious which kind of gets at that side of it. That's not a beautiful part of African American experience or a lower-class experience, but it's a real part of it. So that's a real part of the problem. I think the schools too can do things. This tracking, as it is set up, is very devastating. Because when you're in a lower track, it might be OK if the education that the kid was given in the lower track was designed to get them into the higher track. But lower track education is usually designed to keep them in the lower track. That's the biggest problem with it. So that would have to be reconsidered. I don't see that talked about as much as it should be. High-stakes testing—it's not the test itself so much. It's the use of it. And the consequences […] for the kids in the form of teaching that happens. I've heard Obama himself refer to this class of problems. So I think that awareness is there in the administration. But that's another factor in this concentration of factors.

I have named three here: tracking, the consequences of high-stakes testing, and a focus on the nature of parenting early in a child's life. Stereotype threat will come in there because at some point along the way you've got a vanguard. You've got some kids even in the inner-city who are very identified with doing well in school. And if you put them in certain demanding situations, that's going to be a factor that could alienate them. And there is an alternative culture waiting for them that's very appealing for kids that age. So that's how I think about the achievement gap. There isn't going to be anything like a silver bullet. People seem to think that one person sitting at a desk somewhere is going to come up with some particular reform that we can just put all our money in. There are people, philanthropists, who are very powerful in the education world who have just too much hope in single bullets like that.

Gates: Would the legislated allocation of the same amount of tax dollar per student help?

Steele: That would be another factor [laughter]. People think money doesn't count. I think it does, but it may not be all-important. There are probably data that indicate that dollars per student in some situations don't make a difference. One of the more disappointing findings back in the 1960s was when the Coleman Report found that in well-off integrated schools, Black kids were still not doing as well as White kids. Everyone had hoped that putting Black students in wealthier, integrated schools would eliminate performance gaps. But when you think just a second, you realize that there are many other factors that would make Black students' experience in those schools different than White students' experience in those schools—the broader life experiences of those students and their families in this society, the differential wealth between those White and Black families, the identity threat the Black students would have to contend with in those schools, the fact that Black students in those schools may have been placed in lower tracks, and so on. So while dollar allocation per pupil would be an important factor, like all other related factors, it probably would not be all-important—unless other practices were changed.

I think we do know enough now to identify particular levers to pull to reduce these gaps. There are things that will make a situation come together. And that's the approach that's going to have to be understood as necessary in order to deal with these racial and social class achievement gaps.

Gates: What we used to call a holistic approach?

Steele: Yes. You can't just do one thing. You can't de-track, or make teachers' tenure dependent on their students' test scores, or reduce the class size and think that any of these things alone will reduce the gap. If you look at these variables in isolation, which is what we social scientists tend to do, you almost invariably find that they don't make much difference. But together in interaction—these are interaction effects in social science jargon—you can probably find integrative strategies that can lessen the impact of the concentration of factors that cause the problem.

Gates: And the interactive effect has been profoundly devastating on the African American community.

Steele: It's been a concentration of factors that make race a disadvantage in schooling. It's much worse than when we were in school.

Gates: Well, the public school I attended was a working-class, White school in the hills of West Virginia with a handful of Black kids in each class. But it's like Exeter compared to most public schools today. I'm serious. We were taught music, the arts, and social studies. And our White teachers—I had only one Black teacher in twelve years of schooling—were self-esteem factories for us … at least for the smarter kids in our class.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: They weren't, however, for the kids who learned more slowly.

Steele: And see, here we come to Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his situation. Those teachers were seeing you because of the way your mother presented you, because of the way you performed—you read, you knew things, you could function well in school. You were a kid that knew how to handle school socially as well as intellectually.

Gates: Because my parents taught me.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: And they showed up.

Steele: They showed up.

Gates: And my mother was brilliant, and beautiful, and always well-dressed. And you are making me realize, even as I speak, that my mother was, obviously, very aware of stereotype threat.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: Without a doubt.

Steele: So look at how much she did to deflect that. So you didn't have to deal with that in that situation […] When you think about what you were saying earlier, you know, that you always did well on tests and the like. And so it's hard for you to envision what the experience of a Black kid would be being affected by stereotype threat in that situation. You've got to associate what your mother did in that situation, how she handled you and the school in that situation. And then how the teachers took pride in you. So you know they're not seeing you through the lens of negative racial stereotypes, you know that they're seeing you as a really smart kid.

Gates: And I am a reflection of them.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: And I've had teachers—White people from the hills of West Virginia—who, after I wrote Colored People, have written to me and say “you made us proud of ourselves.”

Steele: Yes.

Gates: “You made me think I was a good teacher.”

Steele: Yes.

Gates: So that there was a mirror effect at play.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: You're absolutely right. But don't get me wrong. I do believe in stereotype threat. I was raised to be acutely aware of racism. But racism never visited itself upon me in the classroom. If it did, I wasn't aware of it.

Steele: And this is what the data show—that these early experiences of yours and the kind of context that your mother and the teachers created for you in that school made it a non-issue. You just didn't have to worry that you were being seen stereotypically. Your speech, clothes, the behavior and ambitions of your parents, the pride in you among the White teachers, etc. created a context in which it wasn't plausible that you were being seen stereotypically. In fact, they put you in a situation where the recursive process was positive. You did better, making it even less likely that you'd be seen stereotypically, making you feel even more secure in the classroom, which facilitated your performance even more, and so on it went until the process produced a MacArthur “genius” award winner. You just knew completely, in every fiber of your being, that you were seen as a bright, promising kid. And so you went to school that way. I've had enough of that experience myself to know what you're talking about. But I think there are a lot of kids in the United States who don't wind up in that situation.

Gates: Today, overall in the African American community, I think that this attitude would be extraordinarily rare, because of the widening class divide within the race.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: And it's not like I lived a life without racism, that we grew up outside of a racist context in the 1950s and 1960s.

Steele: And because my mother was the head of the PTA, a big force in my school, her kids were going to be seen the right way.

Gates: That's right.

Steele: And they were seen the right way. We thrived in that situation.

Gates: Thank God for our mothers.

Steele: Thank God for that. But I know kids in my class who didn't have that, but who I knew were as smart as I was—it wasn't that I thought “I'm so much smarter.” No, they were just as smart as me.

Gates: But White kids too?

Steele: In my early schooling, I didn't go to school with any White kids.

Gates: Oh, you didn't?

Steele: It was all Black kids.

Gates: Oh, I see. That explains your success [laughter].

Steele: I'd like to think so [laughter]. I'm going to keep stressing this Wilson term, borrowing from Bill, to think about the achievement gap as reflecting a concentration of factors. It's just like the creation of a ghetto. The ghetto is only a post-1920 phenomenon. Everybody thinks it was always there. It wasn't always there.

Gates: No.

Steele: It's macroeconomics. It's migration patterns. It's the outsourcing of jobs. It's federal laws. It's a whole lot of things that come together to create and maintain ghettos.

Gates: Harlem was born in the 1920s.

Steele: That's right. And all those factors also contribute to achievement gaps. So I know I'm talking like a contextually-oriented social scientist. But I think that's the reality of this situation. And people without that context are likely to think—they toy with it like a kid toying with a scab—that Blacks are somehow intellectually inferior.

Gates: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Steele: They just can't drop that bone. It seems like such a compelling question, it's almost like a test of their intellectual integrity that they're able to take that question up.

Gates: You and I are, full disclosure, dear friends and have talked about all these things at length over a long period of time. One of the things we've talked about is the role of genetics, the future of genetics. And, as you know, I've taken a huge passionate interest in genetics because of my recent PBS series, “African American Lives.” I've even taken two genetics courses.

Steele: Oh, my goodness.

Gates: Yeah. And I had my entire genome sequenced. Only—

Steele: You and Steve Pinker.

Gates: Well, Steve Pinker has only had his exome sequenced, which is one percent of his genome, not his full genome.

Steele: Oh.

Gates: There are only perhaps eight people in the entire world who have had their full genomes sequenced. And for this new film series, “Faces of America,” both my father and I have had our genomes sequenced. The results will be revealed on PBS in a four-part series that airs on February 10^th.

Steele: Oh my.

Gates: It is quite interesting. But we won't reveal most of the private medical information.

Steele: So you can't tell me on camera.

Gates: No, but sequencing tells you all kinds of things, like if you're lactose intolerant, or if you can metabolize caffeine. And it gets some things right and some things wrong. But here's the surprise. When I had the “reveal,” the scientists sat there and said “some scientists believe that this particular gene is an intelligence gene. Now this is quite controversial,” they continued, very carefully, “but some geneticists believe that this particular gene signifies intelligence, and here's the result for you and your father. This means that your natural intelligence is plus 5 points because you have this particular gene.” And I just sat there—because you have been telling me for years that sooner or later somebody would claim the existence of an “intelligence gene.” Well, I'm telling you there are people who already believe that there is an intelligence gene or genes right now. But I am sure that some scientists somewhere—not these people of course, they were just analyzing two individuals and sharing the results in the largest possible context, with lots of caveats—will prove that those of us descended from the African continent recently, (we all know that we're descended from the African continent more distantly, 50,000 years ago), are lacking this genetic makeup. I predict that. I'll be astonished if that paper is not being written, or has not already been written. And there could be, unless we are vigilant, very serious public policy consequences.

Steele: Well, it's been said so many times. If you're asking me for a prediction, I would have to agree with you that somebody will make that argument. However, I stand a long way from being convinced about there being any single gene for intelligence. And I'm presuming you do, too—

Gates: Oh, absolutely.

Steele: So we want to clear that up on the tape [laughter].

Gates: But just let me say, since they said I had it, I definitely believe it [laughter]. If they had said no, I would have said this is bogus science [laughter]. I am joking, of course, but to make a larger point: there has been a long tendency within the race, to believe that the—

Steele: There are two groups of us.

Gates: Yes, going back to the “house” and “field” divide under slavery, extending to property owners versus non-property owners, etc., and persisting even to this day, as quiet as it is kept.

Steele: The Talented Tenth, yes. But I profoundly reject that. Because it's against something. It's insidious. And—

Gates: Because there's nothing you can do about school performance if the source resides in your genes. This is the argument people will attempt to make to kill or to delimit compensatory educational programs.

Steele: Well, more than that. I have not seen any clear, convincing evidence that there's something like a single or even a set of genes that determines intelligence. I just don't know of any evidence.

Gates: I don't think that there is either. I completely agree.

Steele: I even go back to the British eugenicists who developed IQ tests and the whole technology for it. The SAT is nothing but the historical legacy of Francis Galton.

Gates: And that should give all of us the creeps. I know it does me.

Steele: Yeah.

Gates: Yeah.

Steele: So I'm going to sound political on this, but I think it's part of an ideology of dominance. That the whole thing, the whole notion has been confected to give, to launder subordination.

Gates: That is a profound observation, Claude. I think it's part and parcel of the same methodology and ideology that says, “This is the Enlightenment. We possess reason. Reason manifests itself through writing books of poetry, philosophical treatises. Look at these Africans. No writing, no poetry, no history, no philosophy, no reason.”

Steele: Yeah.

Gates: “Therefore they are inferior on the Great Chain of Being; therefore, they are less than us; therefore, they are born to be subordinate.”

Steele: My father was, we suspect, the child of a slave, born in 1900—no formal education. He was a teamster when being a teamster meant you handled horses. And he became a truck driver. He was proud to be the first Black teamster in Chicago.

Gates: And he should have been.

Steele: He knew every street and alley and velocity of wind in Chicago. And—

Gates: That's a lot of knowledge.

Steele: That's a lot of knowledge. I mean, he was the MapQuest of how to handle that city. If you gave him an IQ test, he would have had no experience with that.

Gates: Well, it depends on the kind of IQ test you gave him.

Steele: Well, there's no IQ test that would tap that. I don't think there's any sit-down test—where you're sitting down taking it on a piece of paper or a computer screen—that he would have been comfortable with or would have had any familiarity with. So I don't think you can develop a universal IQ test. Because there's such a range of human experience. He was incredibly adept at the politics of Chicago. I mean, he was a heavy intellectual about that, and so the things that he knew about, the things that people really have a lot of experience with and care about, they get intelligent about. What your mother knew about I am sure she was intelligent about, but now you give her, let's say, the non-verbal Raven's Progressive Matrices IQ test and say “well, this is fair because there are no words on it.” Well, she doesn't play those puzzles. She doesn't have experiences with those things. How is she going to perform on it?

Gates: Not very well.

Steele: So giving a test of intelligence that is treated as if it is equally valid for people of widely differing experiences is a project that I don't think is innocent.

Gates: Oh, without a doubt. But they're two different things: One, the nature of intelligence, the other, the measuring of the nature of intelligence, as you know.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: I definitely agree with you about standard IQ tests, without a doubt.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: But on the other hand, just anecdotally, you can look at a child, even if the child is one year old and you know this child is headed for brilliant, marvelous things.

Steele: Well, no.

Gates: You don't?

Steele: You know, there's always the, what is it? Early ripe, early rot.

Gates: I had never heard that before.

Steele: There's that phenomenon too where Malcolm Gladwell has a set of essays or something on this.

Gates: You mean Outliers?

Steele: Yeah, maybe it's in Outliers where he describes a lot of people who were incredibly precocious but then don't wind up very successful at all—

Gates: Who was the psychologist who studied geniuses? They had a funny name for the people he studied.

Steele: Oh, Terman. Are you talking about Lewis Terman?

Gates: Yes, and social scientists nicknamed them the “Termanites” or something.

Steele: The “Termanites,” as in termites or something. I have grandchildren whom I think are the most genius children I've ever seen.

Gates: And the best looking…

Steele: It goes without saying. And yet you can't fall in love with that.

Gates: No.

Steele: I believe this is true across the whole life course—that you have to continually renew your intelligence. If you don't take on challenges, you're not going to have what you had when you were younger.

Gates: That's true. And the great thing about Gladwell's analysis of [Terman's] work is that this man was convinced that genius IQ in the group of people he had identified meant that they would be running the world.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: And these people had a bell curve of performance just like everybody else.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: There were some people who did fantastically well. But most of them were average. And some were disasters.

Steele: I think a hundred years from now or maybe a hundred and fifty years from now we'll look back on this like we look back on certain other kinds of fashionable idiocies.

Gates: I think that we look back upon that now—

Steele: Yes.

Gates: —as a fashionable idiocy.

Steele: Yes. I hope we're getting to that point. I was just in France looking at their system, because Columbia has some exchange programs with them. And it made me more convinced of the following. Where I would take a stand is against something like an SAT exam, which is basically an IQ test. They just changed the name in the late 1940s because they didn't think people would like having to take an IQ test to get into college. So they called it the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Now the SAT no longer means anything. It correlates to a surprisingly minor degree with first-year college grades, and even less with subsequent grades and outcomes in life. And it's disembodied, in that whatever experiences go into performing well on it are not in any way democratically distributed across social class or race. So it begins to be a bottleneck for people from disadvantaged groups. In this way, it launders inequality of opportunity as if it's inequality of intelligence because of the way we conceptualize the meaning of the test.

Gates: It does.

Steele: And so—

Gates: That's a tragedy.

Steele: That's a tragedy. And I really have to say that's how I see it at this point. I've thought a lot about this. Some of my best friends are in ETS. And this doesn't mean I'm against testing. Achievement tests? OK. If you've got a chance to study the curriculum and I'm going to test you on that particular curriculum, that's a lot fairer to me.

Gates: It's a different kind of test, though.

Steele: It's a different kind of test and it's a lot better contingency for you to be under, because to get ready for that test you're not off buying some kind of test prep [program]. You're actually studying curriculum that we think is important for you to learn.

Gates: And that is a much fairer system.

Steele: So the contingency is tied to an achievement test as opposed to an aptitude test.

Gates: That, as a matter of fact, is the system that the British have.

Steele: That's a big distinction.

Gates: The A level and O level exams in Britain are tied to content.

Steele: That's right.

Gates: Not IQ tests.

Steele: And I just saw how the French are like that too. You see throughout that society how people respect performances on those tests, because there's a lot more equal distribution of opportunity there. They do have issues in the banlieues, the suburbs, however.

Gates: They do indeed.

Steele: They do indeed. So I don't want to whitewash that whole thing. But America's use of the SAT in particular and the general section of the Graduate Record [Exam] too, has some tragic consequences that we haven't faced.

Gates: I agree. And I think that it's had devastating consequences on the African American community, without a doubt.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: Let me ask you two more questions. It's a year later. Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you would see an African American elected to the White House in our time?

Steele: Well, in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight, yes of course [laughter]. And I'll give you an explanation. But in truth, no.

Gates: No. And a year later? I talked to you the night of the election and you were as teary as I was. But a year later, what are the prospects for the administration? How is the president doing? Do you think that his election represented a fundamental change in our society? Or is it business as usual? Has everything just returned to normal?

Steele: Well, I'll say what I think has been accomplished that is distinct in his election. I think it's a distinct strategy that he stumbled on in his life and career, and I think it's very meaningful for changing the landscape of things. But I'll confess it's just a theory [laughter]. I think what he did is to use his multiple identities to establish common ground with a broad variety of people. This was the unique thing about his candidacy and the unique insight that enabled him to [win]. The fact that he had all of those identities and he could tell a story that would enable people to relate to those identities in one person, made him not just a Black person. And that's how he got elected. Somehow he had the personal courage, in this American landscape, to represent the truth about himself and the truth about his multiple identities, and to tell those stories. And the effect it had was to mobilize the affection and the identification of a lot of people with him. And I think that changes the politics. Before that innovation, if you will, we as Blacks were just Black politicians arguing almost as an interest group in the landscape. We weren't taken seriously in a broader context. And we couldn't get the whole population to identify with that.

Gates: Remember when Dr. King wanted to talk about Vietnam? Even the “Big Negroes” in the Civil Rights Movement said, “Martin, what's wrong with you?”

Steele: Yes.

Gates: “This is a White people's issue.”

Steele: Yes.

Gates: “We got to deal with race” [laughter]. Dr. King said, “You know, it's time to move on.”

Steele: Yes. So this was his innovation that I think changed that game. It's going to change Black politics and it's going to change the landscape and we're in for a different era because of that.

Gates: President Obama, writing in Dreams of My Father, said that he functions like a Rorschach test to many people. And they impose identities on him.

Steele: Yeah.

Gates: But what happens, Claude, when all of these identities and interests that have affixed themselves to him begin to clash and compete? What happens when we all realize that he can't serve each of his multiple constituencies? Are we seeing this a year later or not?

Steele: My perception is that right now he still has the faith of his base and his constituency so that this strategy of his hasn't started to unravel yet. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. I have a sense that a lot of people still broadly trust him as a person, even though he's having real trouble, as we speak, with health care. He's been a bit Teflon-like with regard to his own personal thing. So that keeps me optimistic about it.

Gates: I think he's blessed with the capacity to deflect and bounce back.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: When you watch him on TV, I believe that you can see that he gets angry. I think that you can see it right on his face. I believe that things hurt him as well.

Steele: Well, you've been up close.

Gates: Well, just over a beer [laughter].

Steele: Yeah [laughter].

Gates: Tell us about your new book. And, full disclosure, it's being published in a series, of which I serve as editor, by W.W. Norton. The series is called Issues of Our Time. And your book, which comes out in March, is called Whistling Vivaldi.

Steele: Yeah. It's the story of stereotype threat research. And it's a story of me a little bit—it bounces back and forth between the narrative of that research and the personal experiences that led to, and sustained it. Because research is a narrative. You start out with a clue, and you're suspicious, you're worried. You try all kinds of things. You read the literature. You try an experiment. You try to produce data. I hope in this book that the reader, over my shoulder, will enjoy the journey toward this idea and will be able to assess the utility of it for themselves. I don't present it as an answer to a particular social problem like the achievement gap or one's psychological happiness. I think it relates to all those things and I think it relates to everybody. So I've tried to find the universal in this story because, as I say, everybody experiences stereotype threat several times a day—that we're concerned about how people could see us in terms of general stereotypes about our various identities. We're not uni-dimensional people. If you read this book, you're going to understand how deep that could be and how much it connects you to the human community, and how interdependent we really are.

Gates: As a person who experienced racial profiling in the criminal justice system, I just want to be clear to our readers that I certainly believe in stereotype threat, without a doubt.

Steele: Yeah.

Gates: But I think it does manifest itself in different places at different times.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: Even among Black people.

Steele: Yes. This is what's fascinating: to identify the circumstances that make it a big deal and the circumstances that make it nothing, for the same person. [Like] at a cocktail party—one can experience intense stereotype threat talking to one person, turn forty-five degrees, talk to another person, and experience no stereotype threat at all. It reveals the power of one's social context—how it can having passing effects and how it can shape one's life choices of where to live, what to study, who to marry, etc. It's not just a passing thing because you experience it in a chronic way over many periods of time and episodes of life. Getting older, for example. A huge percentage of the experience and the learning about what it means to be older is stereotype threat—all of a sudden being seen as older and being responded to as older.

Gates: Oh, yeah.

Steele: And having expectations about you based on your age.

Gates: That's tough.

Steele: That's how these identities become significant to us. I start the book with a story about when I first learned I was Black. It was when I was seven or eight coming home from school on the last day of the school year—you know how exciting that is when you're seven or eight—and learning that we Black kids couldn't go to the swimming pool that was only a couple blocks out of our neighborhood except on Wednesday afternoons when they let Black people swim there. And it was like, “Why? What is that about? What is this? Because we're what? Because we're Black? Because we're Negroes?” at the time…

Gates: Colored.

Steele: Yeah. You never get anything like a satisfying answer to those questions. But all of a sudden that identity, it's there forever now.

Gates: It's a wound.

Steele: It's what Bill Cross, the psychologist, called an encounter with the racial order and that it means something in your life. You're going to have to deal with this. Well stereotype threat is a contingency of identity just like that. And it happens throughout the life course in relation to a variety of identities.

Gates: Of course it does. And this is what you elaborate on so brilliantly in your important book.

Steele: The book is the story of discovering that, with examples from all kinds of people's lives and a lot of examples from my own life.

Gates: And not just Black people?

Steele: Oh, not at all just Black people. Everybody. There's nothing like the stereotype threat that a White male has these days. If it was 1954, White male might not have meant anything. In Europe today, being a White male doesn't mean that much. But in the United States being seen as a White male is a powerful form of stereotype threat that really, again, shapes our relationships with each other.

Gates: That's one of the most remarkable transformations of identity that I have seen in my entire life, over my fifty-nine years.

Steele: Yes.

Gates: Historically, being a “White male” was a pretty cool thing—

Steele: Yeah.

Gates:—in terms of your possibilities of achieving power and wealth. Now it's—

Steele: It's a burden in a lot of situations.

Gates: But let's face it: White guys are still doing pretty well.

Steele: Are they? I'm not going to deny that, but Phil Goff (a former student of yours) and I have a great experiment that ends the book with a version of White male stereotype threat where the participants—White males—are going to have a conversation with two Black guys or two White guys. It's going to be about racial profiling, something really loaded, or it's going to be about love and relationship, something easy to talk about. And then we say “set the chairs up for this conversation while we go down the hall to get your conversation partners.” Well, when they're going to talk to two White partners about anything, they set the chairs very close together. When they're going to talk to two Black partners about love and relationships, they set the chairs close together. But when they're going to talk to two Black guys about racial profiling, the two Black guys are here and they are much farther away [laughter]. And interestingly, how prejudiced you are has no relationship to this.

Gates: Now that's fascinating.

Steele: It's not about prejudice. It's about the White male's susceptibility to being seen in terms of negative stereotypes about their group. And that, therefore, the conversation is high-risk.

Gates: My recently departed dear friend Barbara Johnson once defined a stereotype as an “already read text.” In other words, when a Black person, let's say, comes walking into the room, you've read him or her already. You look at him or her and you say “I know who that is already.” You put them in a box and put them in a category, and they can never get out of it. So you would say that was right?

Steele: Yes. That's a great way to describe it. That's a great story. And you know when you're being seen that way.

Gates: So, Whistling Vivaldi is your first book?

Steele: This is my first book.

Gates: Yeah, you guys don't have to write books.

Steele: We psychologists write articles [laughter].

Gates: Do you enjoy being provost? How's your experience at Columbia?

Steele: I'm very, very happy. I like the job, I like the university, I like the city. The adjustments of moving at this age from one side of the country to the other side, that's a formidable thing. I don't want to dismiss that. But aside from that, I'm rather surprised about how happy an experience it has been.

Gates: I'm happy for you, my friend, and for Columbia. I know you'll be as brilliant as provost as you were as the chair of the Department of Psychology at Stanford and as the magnificent director of the Center for Advanced Study. Thank you.

Steele: Thank you very much.

For a video version of this interview, visit the Webcasts section of the Du Bois Institute web site: http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/webcasts; or the Du Bois Review homepage at the Cambridge Journals Online web site: http://journals.cambridge.org/jid_DBR.