Stereotype threat shapes identities

Being threatened because we have a given characteristic is what makes us most aware of being a particular kind of person.

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 73

What raises a characteristic we have to a social identity we have are the contingencies that go with the characteristic, most often threatening contingencies.

Id. at 74