About a year ago I argued, here, that Claude Steele’s “stereotype threat” theory should have led him to support across the board colorblindness.
“Stereotype threat” means that blacks don’t do well on standardized tests where they believe graders are aware of racial differences in performance on standardized tests. Thus it would seem to follow that race-blind testing, where graders don’t know the race of test takers, and race-blind admissions, where the “graders” did not know the race of the applicants, would be a reasonable solution, if “stereotype threat” is the problem.
Steele, of course, favors no such thing and in fact supported not only soft preferences but hard racial bonuses at Michigan and elsewhere. As I pointed out earlier, he in effect argues that the stereotype that blacks don’t do well on standardized tests causes blacks not to do well on standardized tests and thus that standardized tests should not be used, or at least that the scores of black students on them should not be regarded as reliably measuring anything worthwhile.
Now comes Amy Wax, a law professor at Penn, who demonstrates in OpinionJournal that “the belief that stereotype threat is the sole or even the chief cause of the differences [between blacks and whites in testing] is without foundation.”
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you’ll need to read the whole thing.
Wax does a good job of clarifying the confusion and obfuscation surrounding the stereotype threat phenomenon.
Steele is an intelligent man, and presumably understands how his research is being misconstrued. Yet he fails to correct the obvious error, allowing it to go unchallenged in textbooks and research paper citations.
This reflects very badly on Mr. Steele.
The whole preferences racket is intellectually flawed. One does not correct errors by instituting alternative errors.
If Steele started trying to make things right, he would eventually have to deal with his inherently flawed premises. This would require him to get off the preferences bandwagon (in which case he’d have to walk, alone, wearing his ‘Uncle Tom’ branding).
Stereotype Threat
John at Discriminations says Now comes Amy Wax, a law professor at Penn, who demonstrates in OpinionJournal that “the belief that stereotype threat is the sole or even the chief cause of the differences [between blacks and whites in testing]…