How Stereotypes Affect Us And What We Can Do

Opening July 3 at New Century Theatre: in acclaimed writer Sarah Treem’s The How and the Why, a meeting between two women evolves into an intellectual, professional and personal showdown. New in Insight: What happens when you “interview” a group of testate amoebae after they’ve been filmed in a Smith professor’s lab? It turns out that they’re prepared to reveal quite a bit about themselves. Smith has been awarded a three-year grant for a pilot teaching program aimed at increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities who succeed in science and technology fields. First–year students are reading Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, by social psychologist Claude Steele, as part of the
But avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property, passions much more steady in their operation, and much more universal in their influence. Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days ' labour, civil government is not so necessary. Civil government supposes a certain subordination. But as the necessity of civil government gradually grows up with the acquisition of valuable property, so the principal causes which naturally introduce subordination gradually grow up with the growth of that valuable property. (...) Men of inferior wealth combine to defend those of superior wealth in the possession of their property, in order that men of superior wealth may combine to defend them in the possession of theirs. All the inferior shepherds and herdsmen feel