Summary Of The F Word By Claude Awareness

I am Who I am
In chapter 1 of Claude Steele’s novel Whistling Vivaldi and Firoozeh Dumas’ article “The “F Word”’ the topic of stereotyping play big roles in the authors’ lives. They both understand that your identity is what makes you who are and sometimes can set you aside from other people. In the case of Claude Steele he is an African American man and for Firoozeh Dumas she is Iranian-born woman. Both of them experienced the negative attitudes that came from being who they are and had to face adversity. They both explain to their audiences that even though there is adversity, there are ways to overcome it. The message that both authors are trying to convey to their readers is although identity and stereotyping go together, it does not
To begin this chapter he reminisces on the first time he realized “he was black”. As the reader delves into the chapter they will understand that Steele’s opening statement means he remembers the first time his race was a real issue for him. At that moment he realized his race is something that will affect for his lifetime, this is an example of an identity contingency. An identity contingency is something about you as individual that you cannot change. Despite that fact, Steele gives examples on how you can have those contingencies and still overcome the negativity that comes with them. Identity contingencies big part in our lives and how people perceive us. He goes on by giving the reader an example of an African American teenager who was stereotyped just based on the neighborhood where he was walking down the
The author was born in Iran, but later moved to the United States at age 7. She first introduces us to the exotic names that some members in her family have and how at a young age the other children used to make of their names. After the brief background on them she goes into detail how her name “Firoozeh” was frequently mispronounced or sometimes not said because Americans deemed it “unpronounceable”. The constant abuse and mockery of her name was too much for her so she decide to Americanize her name to “Julie”. After some time the name Julie was working for her, but there was something inside her that felt fake. She did not feel she was being her real self. She eventually dropped “Julie” from her name, but had to re-add the name to her resume when she was applying for a job. Even though she was probably more qualified than some people applying she need to add the name in order to receive a job. Time passed and she dropped “Julie” again an went back to her birth name “Firoozeh”. By then she did not care whether people did not know her name, plus she also lived in Silicon Valley; a place where un-“American” names are