The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  In their unostentatious way, Mormons are almost preternaturally confident about the afterlife. They see their families as divinely ordained units, destined to be together not only here but hereafter. A special third tier of heaven awaits them—the “celestial kingdom”—where those who have accepted what Mormons consider “the fullness of the gospel” will live for eternity reunited with their earthly families.

  But the most important element of contemporary Mormon superiority is moral. In terms of their relation to mainstream American morals and “family values,” Mormons have completely turned the historical tables. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Mormons were openly polygamous. Indeed, early Mormon theology seems to have made the number of wives a man had a mark of his exaltation, bringing him closer to divinity. (Brigham Young had somewhere between twenty-seven and fifty-five wives; Smith had perhaps thirty.) Under intense pressure from United States authorities, the Church finally renounced polygamy in 1890 and disavowed it again in 1904.

  So long as Mormons embraced polygamy, Americans could view them as licentious, deviant, immoral. Today, with their abstemiousness, strong families, and clean-cut children, Mormons can view America as licentious and immoral. From the LDS perspective, as Claudia Bushman puts it, Mormonism is “an island of morality in a sea of moral decay.”

  Thus today, the Mormon sense of exceptionalism is focused less on American manifest destiny and much more on morality and mission. Sit in on a Sunday school class at a Mormon church and you’re likely to hear children sing, I am a child of God, / And He has sent me here. The hymn, commissioned to teach Mormon children about their unique relationship to God, captures the idea of both divine parentage and divine mission. Every generation of Mormons is taught that they are the ones the world has been waiting for. For six millennia, God has held his “peculiar treasure” back, waiting until now to place them on earth to redeem humanity. As Church president Ezra Taft Benson used to tell young Mormons in the 1970s and 1980s:

  For nearly six thousand years, God has held you in reserve to make your appearance in the final days before the Second Coming of the Lord. . . . God has saved for the final inning some of His strongest children, who will help bear off the Kingdom triumphantly. . . . [F]or you are the generation that must be prepared to meet your God.

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  IN THE SUMMER OF 2012, the popular Miami blogger, radio host, and YouTube personality Pepe Billete posted the following online entry, titled “I’m Not a Latino, I’m Not a Hispanic, I’m a Cuban American!”

  I don’t know about you, pero every time I hear someone refer to me as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” me dan ganas de meterle una pata por culo a alguin.* My response is always the same . . . I’m a Cuban American, you comemierda!*

  Oye, the only thing that makes me more proud than being a Miamian is the fact that I am Cuban American.

  After a rant about how the term “Hispanic” is never applied to Spaniards, who get to be called “European” or “Spanish,” Pepe went on to say:

  The fact is that in most of the U.S., when people say “Hispanic” or “Latino,” what they really mean is “Mexican.” Yes, pipo, this is 100% the case. . . . [T]o me, it’s . . . pretty fucking offensive. Cubans and Mexicans come from two very different cultures and have very different experiences here in the U.S. . . . [E]very time I turn on the news and I hear some statistic about “Hispanics,” I know que esos comemierdas are not talking about my fucking people, coño!

  To be fair, Pepe is actually a puppet—whose real identity is a mystery—and he scrupulously added that his intent was “not to propagate any idea that Cubans are somehow ‘better’ than any other group.” Nevertheless, the post provoked outrage among many non-Cuban Hispanics and was widely reposted and retweeted throughout the Miami Cuban community. The truth is that Pepe expressed a sentiment probably shared by most Cuban Americans. As a prominent Miami businessman explained:

  Cubans are a different breed. We are not Latin American, we are not Caribbean, we are Cuban. We are special and distinct from other Latin American groups. And in contrast to other Hispanics in the U.S., I don’t consider myself an immigrant. I am an exile. I did not leave Cuba for economic reasons. I left Cuba because of Communism. I left because I had to.

  Cubans’ sense of their own distinctness long predates Castro’s takeover. According to Cuban-born professors Guillermo Grenier and Lisandro Pérez, from “colonial times” through the pre-Castro period, Cubans “believe[d] they occupied a unique and privileged position in the world order,” creating a strong feeling “of singularity and self-importance in relation to [their] Latin American and Caribbean neighbors.”

  It can be a little hard for an outsider to understand exactly why Cubans think their homeland is so exceptional. What Cubans say on this point is sometimes contradictory, sometimes disturbing. For example, Cuba is the “most Spanish” country in Latin America; Cuba is the “most African” country in Latin America; Cuba is “perhaps the only country of Latin America in which the impact of its aboriginal cultures . . . has been virtually erased from the national consciousness”; Cuba was uniquely valuable in the Spanish empire because its deep harbor and perfect location made it a “key to the Americas”; and Cuba was the Latin American country most similar to the United States (prior to the Communist revolution).

  Whatever the explanation, Cuban exceptionalism can rival that of the Mormons. In his gripping memoir, historian Carlos Eire—who was one of 14,000 children airlifted by the United States out of Cuba in Operation Pedro Pan in 1962—recalls a boyhood teacher in Havana asking the class what Columbus said when he “set foot on Cuba”:

  Looking the teacher straight in the eye, Miguel answered: “Columbus said, ‘This is the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes.’”

  “Excellent. I’m glad to see . . . that at least some of you have had a proper upbringing and were told about this at home, before we got to today’s lesson. You know, what Columbus said is very, very important. It may be one of the most important things ever said about our island, and one of the most true.”

  “Yes, Cuba is a paradise,” said Ramiro, unbidden. . . . “My dad told me that the Garden of Eden was here in Cuba, and that Adam and Eve were not only the first humans, but also the first Cubans, and that the entire human race is kind of Cuban. And he also said that this is the reason we don’t have any poisonous reptiles at all.”

  “True, Ramiro, Cuba is a paradise, and it might very well have been the original Paradise, the Garden of Eden. How many of you have heard this before?”

  A good number of hands went up.

  “Yes, Cuba is a paradise. There is no other place on earth as lovely as Cuba, and that’s why you should be so proud of your country.”

  The Cuban superiority complex was particularly strong in the Exile community (those who fled Cuba between 1959 and 1973). The Exiles largely came from a racial and class background that, in Cuba’s highly stratified society, already armed many of them with a sense of entitlement and superiority. They were overwhelmingly white, middle to upper class, and included members of some of Cuba’s most prominent families. Like the Bacardi family and Robert Goizueta, Eire came from “the crème de la crème of Cuban society.” His father was a prominent judge and art collector—in their living room hung a painting of Jesus as a child ascribed to Murillo—whose parents had grown up with slaves in their household.

  No matter how penniless, the Cuban Exiles who arrived in Miami never identified themselves with—indeed separated themselves from—America’s other, relatively poor Hispanic communities. Most children of Cuban Exiles, writes Cuban-born Professor Miguel de la Torre, “are taught by their parents and the overall Exilic community that they are somehow different from other Hispanics, specifically Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. As they are instilled with pride for their heritage, these children are unconsciously taught never to allow anyone to confuse them with those other Latinos/as. In fact, Cubans learn
to regard themselves as equal to, if not more advanced than, the North Americans in intelligence, business acumen, and common sense.” The enclave the Exiles created would eventually become the vibrant and prosperous Little Havana, and Miami “the second largest Cuban city in the world.”

  Which brings us back to Pepe. Fifty years after the first Exiles arrived, the proud sense of cubanía they brought with them remains powerful among Cuban Americans today, giving them a distinctive self-definition infamous among other Latinos. In 2010, an article widely circulated on the Internet declared that the Cubans in exile are the “only globally transplanted population in the world which (except for the Jews) in more than a third of a century has not lost its identity.” The statement is a wild exaggeration—Cubans and Jews are hardly the only diaspora populations to have retained their identity—but nonetheless telling. Nor is the comparison wholly inapt. Like the biblical Jews, Cuban Americans have created an identity for themselves as an exceptional people expelled from their promised land.

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  THE IRONY IN THESE CLAIMS to exceptionality is—their unexceptionality. All of America’s disproportionately successful groups have a superiority complex; in fact most are famous for it. In Asia, everyone knows about the Chinese superiority complex, which is so deeply ingrained that it held like a rock in the face of centuries of decline and is now surging because of China’s meteoric rise. In the Middle East, the Iranians’ superiority complex is equally notorious.

  We’ll leave the details of these and our other remaining groups’ superiority complexes to later chapters, where we’ll show how they function as part of the Triple Package as a whole. Here, we shift focus to a converse but equally important point: the absence of a superiority complex in one of America’s relatively less successful groups. No discussion of superiority and inferiority in the United States could be complete without taking on the fraught subject of race, to which we now turn.

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  FOR MOST OF ITS HISTORY, America did pretty much everything a country could do to create a narrative of superiority—moral and intellectual, political and economic—for its white population and the opposite for everyone else. White supremacy was an equal-opportunity discriminator, targeting all nonwhites from the Native American tribes to Chinese “coolies” to Mexican laborers. For centuries, however, the central corollary of white superiority was black inferiority. Over and over, African Americans have refuted and fought back against the narrative of inferiority that the United States tried to impose on them, but its legacy persists.

  Black America is of course no one thing: “not one or ten or ten thousand things,” as President Obama’s first inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander has written. There are black families and communities in the United States occupying every possible socioeconomic position. There are longstanding black “aristocracies” up and down the East Coast, in Chicago, and in California, who do indeed have superiority complexes—quite strong ones, going back generations. But that’s not the world in which the majority of African Americans grow up.

  Sean “Diddy” Combs—rapper, record producer, fashion tycoon, the second-wealthiest African American and the richest person in hip-hop—says this about growing up black in the United States:

  The thing that really shocked people was when Biggie [fellow rapper The Notorious B.I.G.] admitted that being young and black and living in America makes you feel like you want to kill yourself. . . .

  If you study black history, it’s just so negative, you know. It’s just like, OK, we were slaves, and then we were whipped and sprayed with water hoses, and the civil rights movement, and we’re American gangsters. I get motivated for us to be seen in our brilliance. And that’s the way I always wanted it to be in my fashion. . . . I’d rather show the kids [wealth] than to constantly see the cutaways on television of us just living in the projects.

  Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts, as Combs himself did. Families and whole communities can create narratives of pride that reject the master narratives of their society, or turn those narratives around, reversing their meaning. As one successful African American lawyer put it:

  I was raised to think that just by the fact of being a black woman in America I would always have to do twice as much for half of the credit. My parents expected a lot of me, and when things seemed unfair I was reminded of the struggles and sacrifices of our ancestors. Simply put: your great-great-grandparents were slaves—what obstacle could there be that you cannot overcome?

  In any given family, an unusually strong parent or even grandparent can instill in children every one of the Triple Package traits. But when you’re not from a Triple Package group, creating a Triple Package family is much harder. It takes more strength, more inner resources. Over time, exceptional individuals could conceivably change society’s master narrative about their group. But today, the fact remains, notwithstanding historic breakthroughs like the presidential election of 2008, that the majority of African Americans typically still do not—to put it mildly—grow up with a group superiority complex.

  And this cultural fact, in combination with other intractable problems of race and class in America, helps propel a cycle of poverty, as Nicholas Powers hauntingly describes:

  You are born to a single mother who is one of the ten million black people in poverty. On the television, in casual talk or music you learn by age five that black equals negative and white, positive. Subconsciously you see your skin as a weight, a burden. . . . You hear stories of family relatives jailed for drugs, who you never met just being released. . . . Your idols are people who look like you in videos rapping on how to kill, steal, and buy. You don’t talk like the wealthy. You know where to buy drugs.

  You graduate but there are no jobs. . . . You try to make a drug deal, quick cash you think. . . . You get busted again and again until you are living inside a cell. . . . [Y]ears later you get out. No one will hire you. No one can let you stay at their apartment, it’s against the rules. You beg on the train sometimes, but run in shame when you bump into a relative.

  Obviously Powers, like Combs, is speaking at one level only about inner-city black American communities. But African Americans in every stratum of American society, including the most successful, repeatedly testify to the internal burdens of being black in the United States and the “sheer force of will” required to succeed “while being condescended to (under the best of circumstances).”

  But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of a group superiority complex caused African American poverty. Historically, the causes of black poverty in the United States barely require repeating: slavery, violence, the breaking up of families, exclusion, systematic discrimination, and so on. Today, a host of factors contribute to continuing black poverty, including schools that fail to teach, banks that refuse to lend, employers who won’t hire or promote, and the fact that a third of young black men in this country are in jail or on parole. Nor does the absence of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional hurdle, a psychological and cultural disadvantage, that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.

  Moreover, the theory of the Triple Package allows an additional observation, which is much more difficult to deal with—or even to acknowledge.

  At least since Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights acts of the 1960s, America’s official racial mantra has been equality. You can criticize America’s ideal of equality as unfulfilled—some might even call it hypocritical—but its premises are clear and noble. All individuals are equal; every race is equal; every group is just as good as every other.

  But the dirty secret is that the groups enjoying disproportionate success in America do not tell themselves, “We’re as good as other people.” They tell themselves they’re better.

  In this paradoxical sense, equality isn
’t fair to African Americans. Superiority is the one narrative that America has relentlessly denied to or ground out of its black population, not only in the old era of slavery and Jim Crow, but equally in the new era of equality, when everyone must kowtow to the idea that there’s no difference between different racial groups. “We’re a superior people,” is the one belief America has consistently and deliberately tried to deny blacks, from the day the first African captives were bought by American settlers, to the days of affirmative action, white guilt, and mass incarceration.

  It’s one thing for a group with a longstanding superiority complex to pledge allegiance to the idea of universal equality. After all, a group’s silent belief in its own superiority isn’t fundamentally altered by this declaration; indeed, as they proclaim the equality of all mankind, members of such a group can pride themselves on their generosity and open-mindedness (showing just how superior they really are). It’s quite another thing for a group with a long history of inferiority narratives behind it to be asked to pledge allegiance to the same ideal.

  Not coincidentally, most of America’s great black colleges and universities—Morehouse, Spelman, Howard, and many others—were founded with the mission of fostering the kind of collective pride that other groups in the United States turn into superiority narratives. There’s a huge difference in black students’ academic experience when the honors students, student body president, and math and science prizewinners are all African American; placing a special curricular emphasis on the accomplishments of African Americans and the African diaspora, as these colleges usually do, can make a big difference too. Studies strongly suggest that the sense of group pride instilled in students at historically black colleges and universities has contributed to their achieving better academic and economic outcomes. It’s hardly a coincidence that so many of America’s most influential black figures—including Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Jesse Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison—attended historically black colleges.