[9] Steele was born on January 1, 1946, to parents Ruth (a white social worker) and Shelby (an African-American truck driver) in Chicago, Illinois.

[10][11] Claude recalls his family, including his twin brother Shelby Steele and two other siblings, as being deeply interested in social issues and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

At Hiram College, Steele's passion for reading novels led to an interest in how the individual faces the social world.

[14] Steele was inspired by African-American social psychologist Kenneth Clark's TV appearance discussing the psychological implications of the 1964 race riots in Harlem, New York City,[12] which led to doing behavioral research.

Steele conducted early experimental research at Hiram College in physiological psychology (looking at behavioral motives in Siamese fighting fish) and social psychology (studying how African-American dialect among kids maintains ethnic/racial identity),[11] where he worked under the mentorship of social psychologist, Ralph Cebulla.

[16] He stepped down in April 2016 citing family reasons, shortly after a scandal erupted regarding the university's alleged disregard of sexual harassment.

[17] Throughout his academic career, his work fell into three main domains of research under the broad subject area of social psychology: stereotype threat, self-affirmation, and addictive behaviors.

Although separate and distinct, the three lines of research are linked by their shared focus on self-evaluation and how people cope with threats to their self-image and self-identities.

[12] Developed in the 1980s, self-affirmational processes referred to the ability to reduce threats to self-image by stepping back and affirming a value that is important to self-concept.

[31] The theories of stereotype threat can be applied for better understanding group differences in performance not only in intellectual situations but also in athletics.

Whistling Vivaldi focuses on the phenomenon of stereotype threat as it explains the trend of minority underperformance in higher education.

In July 2015, Steele was tasked by the University of California, Berkeley, with managing the investigation of alleged sexual harassment of an employee by Sujit Choudhry, who was at that time Dean of its School of Law.

Claude and his late wife Dorothy had been known to collaborate on projects dedicated to prejudice in American society[39] and minority student achievement.

[34] His twin brother, Shelby Steele, is a conservative writer and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.