If anything, they were trying too hard. Being under the threat of a stereotype is different from self-fulfilling a stereotype. It’s being in a predicament, a social-psychological predicament. It’s having to contend with the real threat of being judged or treated in terms of a bad stereotype about your group. It’s a threat in the air that derives from stereotypes rooted in our nation’s history and the reaches of that history into the present. Right there in the middle of the test, these participants were contending with the far reaches of American history and society. As William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Identity threat can be life-shaping, pushing people in and out of settings, even in and out of whole walks of life.

Material features of a setting reflect society, its history and culture. They signal what’s valued— which traditions, values, achievements— and who belongs.

Think of Tyler showing up to school— possibly prospecting for food in trash cans along the way. He’s undoubtably in a preoccupying state of churn. He knows he might be seen and treated in school based on the poverty and status of his family, on skill and vocabulary deficiencies possibly tied to that poverty, on having a dialect and even clothes that reflect his social status, on not having seen much of the world outside his neighbourhood, and so on.

A big way that poverty undermines schooling is to make it seem irrelevant to one’s life.