Dr. Claude Steele, provost of Columbia University and recognized leader in the field of social psychology, spoke at DiversityInc's March 2010 event on how negative stereotypes perpetuate the achievement gap between Blacks and whites and limit the workforce talent potential. Dr. Steele has been invited to speak again at our upcoming November event. Click here to learn more.
This book is about what my colleagues and I call identity contingencies—the things you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given social identity, because you are old, young, gay, a white male, a woman, Black, Latino, politically conservative or liberal, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a cancer patient and so on. Generally speaking, contingencies are circumstances you have to deal with in order to get what you want or need in a situation. In the Chicagoland of my youth, in order to go swimming at the public pool I had to restrict my pool going to Wednesday afternoons. That's a contingency. What makes this an identity contingency is that the people involved had to deal with it because they had a particular social identity in the situation. Other people didn't have to deal with it, just the people who had the same identity I had.
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