How Stereotypes Affect Us Analysis

Ordinarily I would not be enthusiastic to read an excerpt like Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us by Claude M. Steele, but on the contrary, I found that I was extremely impacted, this reading opened my eyes to an infinite amount of possibilities that I had not been worried about before. There were multiple sections of this reading that was baffling, I choose to write about a passage that dumbfounded me completely, I found this on page four of the excerpt under chapter 2 about 7 paragraphs in and it states “I became an expert in the language of fear. Couples locked arms or reached for each other’s hand when they saw me. Some crossed to the other side of the street. People who were carrying on conversations went mute …show more content…
Alarmed are these strangers, though they are afraid of the possibilities that they have heard could happen, and they are not afraid of the him, the reasoning behind that is that they have never met him before just passed him in the streets; which makes it clear that they fear the race all together. Consequently, to have that much fear in a race makes it apparent that something had been taught to these people in the streets from a young age, racism is not something one is born with but it is something that can be taught. These people are taking what generations have passed on and teaching it to new generations of children. Growing up, my parents taught to respect anyone that respected me, but to always be polite. For years I have taken these concepts seriously as I have grown, I do know that no one is raised in an exactly similar upbringing, people all have their own perception of how they treat people, but observing the disrespect to other ethnicities do to no fault of their own made me extremely livid. Nevertheless, if these people had a fear based on the fact this man had harmed them in the past it would be a different story, but they have no factual evidence to be fearful