Week Six Cultural Blog Post.

March 15, 2015

What is Stereotype Threat?

This week I will be writing about an issue called Stereotype Threat. To quote from Wikipedia: “Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group.” In other words it is a mechanism that can cause lowered intellectual performance in the person that is experiencing it.

Thankfully to my knowledge I have not been impacted by Stereotype Threat. Being a religious Jew I have heard from my grandmother how the daily discrimination she faced in the former Soviet Union, impacted her in every facet of life. Unfortunately even here in the United States there are people that are being discriminated against even if not in a institutional way. This discrimination effects them even many years down the road.

In my opinion one of the things everybody can do to reduce the occurrence of Stereotype Threat is by providing role-models that actively disprove the racial stereotype and show that no matter who a person is it can be done.