By AMY CHUA and JED RUBENFELDJAN. 25, 2014
A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for
some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are
alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and
national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure
(roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-,
Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years,
Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many
of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some groups
“better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived
life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most
broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’
adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over
two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of
American Nobel laureates.
The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they
are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their
children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and
education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small
part of the picture.
Today’s wealthy Mormon businessmen often started from humble
origins. Although India and China send the most immigrants to the United States
through employment-based channels, almost half of all Indian immigrants and
over half of Chinese immigrants do not enter the country under those criteria.
Many are poor and poorly educated. Comprehensive data published by the Russell
Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and
Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of
their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
Take New York City’s selective public high schools like
Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013
school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a
standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites
and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of
restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than
others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a
firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the
facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far
outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and
African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s
higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians.
Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United
States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard
Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans
have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent
of whites.
Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from
widespread penury to relative affluence. By 1990, United States-born Cuban
children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing —
were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All
three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and
Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are
some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The
fortunes of WASP elites have been declining for decades. In 1960,
second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of
any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate
after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores
143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a
2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation
Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the
whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate,
biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly
successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel
success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their
exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling
that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
Any individual, from any background, can have what we call
this Triple Package of traits. But research shows that some groups are
instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater
success.
It’s odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior
and insecure. Yet it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates
drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse
control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who
systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a
core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
We know that group superiority claims are specious and
dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that
it’s exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are “gods in embryo”
placed on earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the
historian Claudia L. Bushman’s words, as “an island of morality in a sea of
moral decay.” Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a
Persian “superiority complex.” At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish
children hear that Jews are the “chosen” people; later they may be taught that Jews
are a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors.
That insecurity should be a lever of success is another
anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or
even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is
almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising
groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their
children.
A central finding in a study of more than 5,000 immigrants’
children led by the sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut was how frequently the kids
felt “motivated to achieve” because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem
their parents’ sacrifices. Numerous studies, including in-depth field work
conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant
parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children
(“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their
success.
By contrast, white American parents have been found to be
more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem. There’s an
ocean of difference between “You’re amazing. Mommy and Daddy never want you to
worry about a thing” and “If you don’t do well at school, you’ll let down the
family and end up a bum on the streets.” In a study of thousands of high school
students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial
group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s
most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of
insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a
strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their
children. Hence the common credo: They can take away your home or business, but
never your education, so study harder. Newcomers and religious minorities may
face derision or hostility. Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro’s takeover
reported seeing signs reading “No dogs, no Cubans” on apartment buildings.
During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear Mitt Romney’s clean-cut
sons described as “creepy” in the media. In combination with a superiority
complex, the feeling of being underestimated or scorned can be a powerful
motivator.
Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of
contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the
virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses
don’t live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling
children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every
one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of
childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age — or at least
they did so when they were on the rise.
In isolation, each of these three qualities would be
insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere
insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in
combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the
“longing to rise.”
Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these
qualities in all their members. They don’t have to. A culture producing, say,
four high achievers out of 10 would attain wildly disproportionate success if
the surrounding average was one out of 20.
But this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits
has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience
beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they’re
never good enough. “I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my
parents,” recalls the novelist Amy Tan. “It’s a horrible feeling.” Recent studies
suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite
media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide).
A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group
supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout
history. To be sure, a group superiority complex somehow feels less ugly when
it’s used by an outsider minority as an armor against majority prejudices and
hostility, but ethnic pride or religious zeal can turn all too easily into
intolerance of its own.
Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of
success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning —
precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals
striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and
money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
It’s not easy for minority groups in America to maintain a
superiority complex. For most of its history, America did pretty much
everything a country could to impose a narrative of inferiority on its nonwhite
minorities and especially its black population. Over and over, African-Americans
have fought back against this narrative, but its legacy persists.
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are professors at Yale Law School
and the authors of the forthcoming book “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely
Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”
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