The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  the post provoked outrage: Pepe Billete, “I’m Not a Latino, I’m Not a Hispanic, I’m a Cuban American! (Part Dos),” Miami New Times, July 13, 2012, http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/cultist/2012/07/pepe_billete_im_not_a_latino_i.php (“Last week I managed to upset a pretty big segment of Miami’s non-Cuban Spanish speaking population”).

  “Cubans are a different breed”: Interview with José Pico, director and president, JPL Investments Corp., in Miami, Fla. (conducted by Eileen Zelek on Jan. 6, 2012) (on file with authors); see also María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p. 84 (many Cuban Exiles saw themselves as “martyrs” and resisted the label “immigrant” because “Immigrant implies a choice” and they “believed that they had no choice; they had been pushed out of their country. . . . Preserving cubanidad became . . . a political responsibility”); Miguel Gonzalez-Pando, The Cuban Americans (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 31 (quoting one Exile as saying, “We didn’t come here looking for a better life. We already had a good life in Cuba, but our lives were stopped because of the political situation”).

  “unique and privileged position in the world”: Guillermo J. Grenier and Lisandro Pérez, The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Boston: Pearson Education, 2003), p. 33.

  “most Spanish” . . . most similar to the United States: Ibid. pp. 29–31 (inner quotation marks omitted). For a detailed discussion of early Cuban “proto-nationalists,” including those who envisioned a “white Cuba” peopled by “superior beings,” see Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 54–7.

  “Looking the teacher straight in the eye”: Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (New York: The Free Press, 2003), pp. 24–5.

  The Exiles: Gonzalez-Pando, The Cuban Americans, pp. 31–4, 45–6; García, Havana USA, pp. xi, 13–4.

  “the crème de la crème of Cuban society”: Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana, p. 27.

  Murillo . . . slaves: Ibid., pp. 13–4.

  never identified themselves with . . . other . . . Hispanic communities: Miguel de la Torre, La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), p. 128; see also ibid., p. 18 (referring to the “Exilic Cubans’ attempt to identify themselves with the Euroamerican dominant culture, and thus against other Hispanic groups”); Grenier and Pérez, The Legacy of Exile, p. 34 (describing bumper stickers in Miami that read: Yo no soy hispano . . . yo soy cubano).

  “the second largest Cuban city in the world”: Grenier and Pérez, The Legacy of Exile, p. 48.

  “only globally transplanted population”: Sheyla Paz Hicks, trans., “Article about Cubans Written by Mexican Journalist Victor Mona,” http://www.spanish-tvtucanal.com/beta/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=199:cuba-y-los-cubanos&catid=1:latest&Itemid=2 (translation edited by authors). Although the article is usually attributed to “Mexican journalist Victor Mona,” some say it was actually written by a Cuban-American journalist.

  “not one or ten or ten thousand things”: Elizabeth Alexander, “Today’s News,” in Arnold Rampersad and Hilary Herbold, eds., The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 1.

  black “aristocracies”: Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

  the second-wealthiest African American: See “Richest African Americans—Forbes Wealthiest Black Americans,” Forbes.com, Apr. 20, 2012, http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/nation/wealthiest-african-americans.

  “The thing that really shocked people”: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell, The Black List (New York: Atria Books, 2008), pp. 130–1 (quoting Sean Combs).

  “I was raised to think”: E-mail to Amy Chua, Oct. 15, 2013 (on file with authors).

  do not . . . grow up with a group superiority complex: See, e.g., Jayanti Owen and Scott M. Lynch, “Black and Hispanic Immigrants’ Resilience Against Negative-ability Racial Stereotypes at Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States,” Sociology of Education 85, no. 4 (2012), pp. 304–5. Empirical evidence of the power of these negative stereotypes can be found in the “stereotype threat” literature, discussed below.

  “You are born to a single mother”: Nicholas Powers, “Jim Crow America: Why Our Society’s Racial Caste System Still Exists,” The Indypendent (July 24, 2012).

  “sheer force of will”: Greenfield-Sanders and Mitchell, The Black List, p. 4.

  a third of young black men: David J. Harding, Living the Drama: Community, Conflict, and Culture Among Inner-City Boys (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 18; see generally Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

  fostering the kind of collective pride: Gaetane Jean-Marie and Anthony H. Normore, “A Repository of Hope in Social Justice: Black Women Leaders at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” in Anthony H. Normore, ed., Leadership for Social Justice: Promoting Equity and Excellence Through Inquiry and Reflective Practice (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2008), pp. 7–8 (part of threefold “mission” of the HBCUs in their first century was “provid[ing] a service to the Black community and the country by aiding in the development of leadership [and] racial pride”).

  better academic and economic outcomes: Kassie Freeman, ed., African American Culture in Higher Education Research and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 9 (“studies suggest that African American students who attend HBCUs experience higher intellectual gains and have a more favorable psychosocial adjustment, a more positive self-image, stronger racial pride, and higher aspirations”); Mikyong Minsun Kim and Clifton F. Conrad, “The Impact of Historically Black Colleges and Universities on the Academic Success of African-American Students,” Research in Higher Education 47, no. 4 (2006), pp. 399–400, 402 (finding that African American students have a “similar probability of obtaining a BA degree whether they attended [HBCUs] or a historically White college or university (HWCU),” but “among African-American college graduates, a disproportionately high percentage of political leaders, lawyers, doctors, and Ph.D. recipients have graduated from HBCUs,” and summarizing other studies that have found that African American students, especially females, exhibit greater cognitive growth at HBCUs, “receive higher grades and have higher degree aspirations than their counterparts at HWCUs”) (citations omitted); Walter R. Allen, “The Color of Success: African-American College Student Outcomes at Predominantly White and Historically Black Public Colleges and Universities,” Harvard Educational Review 62, no. 1 (1992), p. 39 (analyzing the National Study on Black College Students data set and concluding that “the college experience was most successful [in terms of academic achievement, social involvement, and occupational aspirations] for African-American students on campuses with Black majority student populations”).

  attended historically black colleges: Cynthia L. Jackson, African American Education: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), p. 255; “Prominent Alumni,” Morehouse College, https://www.morehouse.edu/about/prominent_alumni.html.

  reclaim black history: Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 34–35; Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 98–99.

  Malcolm X: Diane C. Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 155.

  Louis Farrakhan: Richard W. Leeman, African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westpost, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 128.

  Martin Luther King: Martin Luther King, “Speech at the Great March on Detroit,” June 23, 1963, h
ttp://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_speech_at_the_great_march_ on_detroit; see also Louis A. DeCaro Jr., Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 160.

  pioneering “stereotype threat”: See Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995), pp. 797–811. For a comprehensive review, see Michael Inzlicht and Toni Schmader, eds., Stereotype Threat: Theory, Process, and Application (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  identify their race or gender: See Mary C. Murphy and Valerie Jones Taylor, “The Role of Situational Cues in Signaling and Maintaining Stereotype Threat,” in Inzlicht and Schmader, Stereotype Threat, p. 21; Paul R. Sackett et al., “On Interpreting Stereotype Threat as Accounting for African American-White Differences on Cognitive Tests,” American Psychologist 59, no. 1 (2004), p. 8.

  black students score lower: See Steele and Aronson, “Stereotype Threat”; Claude M. Steele et al., “Contending with Group Image: The Psychology of Stereotype and Social Identity Threat,” in Mark P. Zanna, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (New York: Academic Press, 2002), vol. 34, pp. 379–440; Sackett et al., “On Interpreting Stereotype Threat,” pp. 7–8 (finding has been “well replicated”).

  White male Stanford students: Joshua Aronson et al., “When White Men Can’t Do Math: Necessary and Sufficient Factors in Stereotype Threat,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35 (1999), pp. 29–46.

  Women chess players: Anne Maass et al., “Checkmate? The Role of Gender Stereotypes in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport,” European Journal of Social Psychology 38 (March/April 2008), pp. 231–5. Women’s math scores have been repeatedly shown to fall when gender stereotypes are cued. Patricia M. Gonzales, Hart Blanton, and Kevin J. Williams, “The Effects of Stereotype Threat and Double-Minority Status on the Test Performance of Latino [sic] Women,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28, no. 5 (2002), pp. 659–70; Toni Schmader, “Gender Identification Moderates Stereotype Threat Effects on Women’s Math Performance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2002), pp. 194–201.

  visual rotation: Margaret J. Shih, Todd L. Pittinsky, and Geoffrey C. Ho, “Stereotype Boost: Positive Outcomes from the Activation of Positive Stereotypes,” in Inzlicht and Schmader, Stereotype Threat, pp. 145–6. White students did better on a test when it was described as measuring intellectual capacity than they did when the same test was also described as “fair for different racial groups.” Gregory M. Walton and Priyanka B. Carr, “Social Belonging and the Motivation and Intellectual Achievement of Negatively Stereotyped Students,” in Inzlicht and Schmader, Stereotype Threat, p. 97.

  miniature golf experiment: Jeff Stone, Aina Chalabaev, and C. Keith Harrison, “The Impact of Stereotype Threat on Performance in Sports,” in Inzlicht and Schmader, Stereotype Threat, pp. 220–1.

  Asian undergraduates . . . “strongly identified”: Brian E. Armenta, “Stereotype Boost and Stereotype Threat Effects: The Moderating Role of Ethnic Identification,” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16, no. 1 (2010), pp. 94–8.

  Outside the laboratory: Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizons,” in David Card and Steven Raphael, eds., Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), pp. 206–31.

  “Because of that choice”: Helene Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 29.

  stereotype of Nigerians: See e.g., Helen Fogarassy, Mission Improbable: The World Community on a UN Compound in Somalia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), p. 34; Okechukwu Jones Asuzu, The Politics of Being Nigerian (Lulu.com, 2006), p. 63.

  Igbo or Yoruba: See Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 108–9; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 27–8, 154–5, 250–1.

  an illustrious royal lineage: See Robert S. Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba (3rd ed.) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Babatunde Lawal, “Reclaiming the Past: Yoruba Elements in African American Arts,” in Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 291, 292.

  Igbo are often called: See Thomas D. Boston, ed., A Different Vision: African American Economic Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 177–8; see also Chua, World on Fire, pp. 108–9.

  the “dangers of hubris”: Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), pp. 76–8. A hint of the Igbos’ exclusiveness can also be found in the new fascinating novel Americanah by (Igbo) Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, where a Senegalese hair braider insists that “Igbo marry Igbo always.” See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), p. 15.

  recent study of more than 1,800 students: Owens and Lynch, “Black and Hispanic Immigrants’ Resilience Against Negative-ability Racial Stereotypes,” pp. 303–25.

  the more strongly black immigrant students identify: Yaw O. Adutwum, “The Impact of Culture on Academic Achievement Among Ghanian Immigrant Children” (unpublished dissertation) (USC Digital Library: 2009); Kay Deaux et al., “Becoming American: Stereotype Threat Effects in Afro-Caribbean Immigrant Groups,” Social Psychology Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2007), pp. 384–404; Alwyn D. Gilkes, “Among Thistles and Thorns: West Indian Diaspora Immigrants in New York City and Toronto” (unpublished dissertation) (ProQuest Dissertations and Theses: 2005).

  what they perceive as defeatism: Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (New York and Cambridge, MA: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 65–6.

  “Nigerians . . . feel they are capable of anything”: Patricia Ngozi Anekwe, Characteristics and Challenges of High Achieving Second-Generation Nigerian Youths in the United States (Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2008), p. 128. West Indian immigrants often express a similar view. According to a Jamaican American school teacher:

  I can’t help them [African Americans] because they’re so wrapped up in racism, and they act it out so often, they interpret it as such so often that sometimes they are not even approachable. If they’re going to teach anything and it’s not black, black, all black, they are not satisfied, you know. . . . Sometimes I feel sorry for them, but you find that you just can’t change their attitude because they just tell you that you don’t understand.

  Waters, Black Identities, pp. 171–2.

  “an ethnic armor”: Min Zhou, “The Ethnic System of Supplementary Education: Nonprofit and For-Profit Institutions in Los Angeles’ Chinese Immigrant Community,” in Marybeth Shinn and Hirokazu Yoshikawa, eds., Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 232.

  “Congo people”: Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach, p. 6.

  “Honorables”: Ibid., p. 11.

  “a white girl from Seagrove”: Helene Cooper, “Author Interview,” http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Helene-Cooper/18871279/interviews/91.

  CHAPTER 4: INSECURITY

  “Old World” . . . “secret restlessness”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969) vol. 2, part II, chap. 13, pp. 535–8.

  “All are constantly bent”: Ibid., vol. 2, part III, chap. 19, p. 627.

  “never stop thinking” . . . “cloud”: Ibid., vol. 2, part II, chap. 13, pp. 536, 538.

  “longing to rise”: Ibid., vol. 2, part III, chap. 19, p. 627.

  “in the midst of their prosp
erity”: Ibid., vol. 2, part II, chap. 13, p. 535.

  “Hell hath no fury”: What William Congreve actually has his character Zara say in The Mourning Bride is “Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d/Nor hell a fury like a woman scorn’d” (Act III, scene VIII). See “The Mourning Bride: A Tragedy,” in John Bell, Bell’s British Theatre Consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays (London: George Cawthorn, British Library, 1797), vol. 19, p. 63.

  Everything can be borne but contempt: Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), p. 181 (quoting Voltaire’s Traité de métaphysique) (“To be an object of contempt to those with whom one lives is a thing that none ever has been, or ever will be, able to endure”).

  about a third: Thomas D. Boswell and James R. Curtis, The Cuban-American Experience: Culture, Images, and Perspectives (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), p. 46.

  forced to take any work: María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p. 20; Miguel Gonzalez-Pando, The Cuban Americans (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 36.

  “less-advertised corollary”: Tad Friend, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), p. 153; see also E. Digby Baltzell, “The Protestant Establishment Revisited,” The American Scholar 45, no. 4 (1976), pp. 499, 505 (noting that third-generation WASPS went to “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, where they joined the best clubs and graduated usually . . . with ‘gentleman Cs’”), pp. 506, 512.

  A culture that “once valued education”: Peter Sayles, “Report from Newport RI: American WASPs—Dispossessed, Degenerate . . . Or Both?” VDARE.com, Jan. 20, 2013; see also Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), pp. 115, 131.