My English 1 students will recognize something familiar in Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us since Brent Staples whistles exactly this to put people at ease. We learn this about Staples, a friend of Steele’s, in Staples’ “Black Men in Public Space,” an essay that has been anthologized in most introductory English texts.

What distinguishes Staples, who’s an adjunct professor at several colleges and who writes occasional columns for The New York Times, is the empathy he expresses when he’s stereotyped by those who fear him. “Black Men in Public Space” relates how when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, his skin color and size — he was a young, 6′2″ African-American man who tended to wear fatigues and an Afro — defined him more than his intellect.

Brent Staples

Instead of getting angry for being treated unfairly, however, he empathized with those who feared him and used coping strategies, like whistling Vivaldi, to put strangers at ease. Some might object that one shouldn’t modify one’s identity to please others. This strategy, it would seem, runs so counter to the American libertarian ethos that some believe so strongly — I own myself and so do you, so leave me alone — that empathy, like liberal, is becoming an epithet for some.

It’s important to remember that empathy is a state of mind. It’s the ability for someone to walk in someone else’s shoes, to understand his or her needs, her impediments, her turning points, her resolutions. Empathy should be the precursor to action. Only after understanding another’s point of view should we decide what action to take at which point we might decide to express sympathy or antipathy, kindness or anger. While empathy doesn’t predetermine what action we’ll take, it does encourage us to step outside our too-often self-serving opinions before taking action.

This is the ideal, but Staples understood that if a young woman walking in Hyde Park at night encountered him, not knowing anything more about him besides his appearance, she might well run for her life because we’re not always able to do a proper assessment if we are fearful. And so he developed a coping strategy that put others at their ease.

While I’ve just started reading Steele’s book and won’t really have time to continue until the semester is finished, final papers are graded, and grades are in, Steele seems to suggest, based on psychological studies, that stereotypes have a significant effect on how we behave and, that teachers, who can affect students in subtle ways, need to understand how easily they can discourage students when they intend just the opposite.