by Amy Chua
“got lazy”: Robert Frank, “That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2010; see also David Brooks, “Why Our Elites Stink,” New York Times, July 12, 2012.
“the scum of the Earth”: Gonzalez-Pando, The Cuban Americans, pp. 46–7.
“an ideological quest”: Ibid.
contempt of discrimination: García, Havana USA, pp. 18–20, 40; Gonzalez-Pando, The Cuban Americans, p. 37; Guillermo J. Grenier and Lisandro Pérez, The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Boston: Pearson Education, 2003), p. 52.
“When we first arrived in Miami”: 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 Gonzalez-Pando, The Cuban Americans, p. 37.
plummet in status: Susan Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland (New Haven, CT, and London: Routledge, 2009), p. 83; David Rieff, The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 48; Gonzalez-Pando, The Cuban Americans, pp. 34–6.
“my father would run into people who knew him”: Telephone interview with Professor Domitila Fox, Florida International University (conducted by Eileen Zelek on Mar. 17, 2012) (on file with authors); see also García, Havana USA, pp. 18–20.
“the one dependable emotional motive”: Robert C. Solomon, “Nietzsche and the Emotions,” in Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer, eds., Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 127, 142.
Ancient Persia is seen, if at all, through a Greek lens: Much of this paragraph is taken from Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 4, 6–7; see also Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), pp. 5–7; Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Dffer: The Paradox of Modern Iran (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 163.
“I just can’t get over the humiliation”: “Xerxes and the Persian Army: What They Really Looked Like,” A Persian’s Perspective, Mar. 18, 2007, http://persianperspective.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/xerxes-and-the-persian-army-what-they-really-looked-like.
Iran is Persia: Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 3, 30–1.
“a superpower like nothing the world had ever seen”: Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, p. 3; see Chua, Day of Empire, p. 4.
larger even than Rome’s . . . 42 million people: see Chua, Day of Empire, p. 4.
Persian “superiority complex”: See, e.g., Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, p. 164; Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), p. 192.
“All Iranians”: see Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, p. 163.
“a widely remarked sense of superiority”: Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, p. 3; see also Graham, Iran, pp. 190–2 (describing Iran’s “sense of superiority” and sense of “uniqueness,” which “derives from a somewhat romanticised view of their history, but centres round the suppleness with which they have been able to survive different waves of conquest and absorb cultural influences without having their own identity submerged”); Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 492–3 (noting how twentieth-century nationalist movements in Iran “underscored Persian superiority”).
Alexander the Great: Chua, Day of Empire, p. 27.
“such a brute”: Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, p. 164; see also ibid., p. 12 (mentioning the author’s grandfather, “who also happened to be an Ayatollah”); Chua, Day of Empire, pp. 24–6.
“savage bedouins” . . . “camel’s milk and lizards”: Joya Blondel Saad, The Image of Arabs in Modern Persian Literature (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), pp. 6–7.
“constantly fight among themselves”: Ibid., p. 8 (quoting from a classic eleventh-century work by Nâser Khosrow).
most famous modern author, Sâdeq Hedâyat: Ibid., p. 29.
“locusts and plague” . . . “black, with brutish eyes”: Ibid., p. 37 (quoting Sâdeq Hedâyat).
“equated Arab domination of Iran”: Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 25.
“Iranians don’t like being called Arabs”: Shadi Akhavan, “Close Enough” (op-ed), Iranian.com, Aug. 25, 2003, http://iranian.com/Opinion/2003/August/Close/index.html.
“tremendous sense of insecurity”: Graham, Iran, p. 194; see also Graham E. Fuller, The “Center of the Universe”: The Geopolitics of Iran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), p. 20.
“with its immediate neighbours”: Graham, Iran, p. 192.
“national pursuit of empowerment”: Abbas Amanat, “The Persian Complex,” New York Times, May 25, 2006.
insecurity, too, was part of the cultural inheritance: Nima Tasuji, “Reconstructing a New Identity,” in Tara Wilcox-Ghanoonparvar, ed., Hyphenated Identities: Second-Generation Iranian-Americans Speak (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2007), p. 7.
Status loss, anxiety, resentment, and even trauma: Mohsen M. Mobasher, Iranians in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), p. 8.
status collapse: See ibid., p. 8; Tara Bahrampour, “Persia on the Pacific,” The New Yorker, Nov. 10, 2003.
House of Sand and Fog . . . Crash: See Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999); Bahrampour, “Persia on the Pacific”; Carol Gerster, “CRASH: A Crash Course on Current Race/Ethnicity Issues,” The Journal of Media Literacy 55, nos. 1 and 2.
Iranian flags were burned in public, and demonstrators carried signs: See, e.g., Mobasher, Iranians in Texas, p. 34.
fled to the United States precisely to escape: Mitra K. Shavarini, Educating Immigrants: Experiences of Second-Generation Iranians (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004), pp. 38–41.
“God, please don’t let them be Muslim or Iranian”: Shadi Akhavan, “Take It from a Good Girl: Fight Back!,” The Iranian, Dec. 27, 2002, http://iranian.com/Features/2002/December/Tough/index.html.
“stigma to be hidden . . . insecurity and even feelings of self-hatred”: Tasuji, “Reconstructing a New Identity,” p. 6; see also Shavarini, Educating Immigrants, pp. 7, 113–4; Maryam Daha, “Contextual Factors Contributing to Ethnic Identity Development of Second-Generation Iranian American Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescent Research 26, no. 5 (2011), pp. 543, 554, 563; Mohsen Mobasher, “Cultural Trauma and Ethnic Identity Formation Among Iranian Immigrants in the United States,” American Behavioral Scientist 50 (2006), pp. 100, 108.
branded part of the “axis of evil”: Mobasher, Iranians in Texas, pp. 45–7.
Some Iranian parents: Shavarini, Educating Immigrants, p. 5; Mobasher, “Cultural Trauma and Ethnic Identity Formation Among Iranian Immigrants in the United States,” pp. 103, 113.
self-parodying Internet video: “Iranian Census 2010 PSA with Maz Jobrani,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgoLjFJ0rVg.
“stigmatized and humiliated”: Mobasher, Iranians in Texas, p. 8.
survey of second-generation Iranian Americans: Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 543, 547, 552–4.
intense need to distinguish themselves: Shavarini, Educating Immigrants, p. 6.
status-conscious: See, e.g., Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 560–1; Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Daniel Douglas, “Success(ion): Second-Generation Iranian Americans,” Iranian Studies 44, no. 1 (2011), pp. 5, 7.
“every Mercedes you see belongs to an Iranian person”: Shavarini, Educating Immigrants, p. 150; see also ibid., pp. 147–51; Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 560�
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“The American ideal”: Neema Vedadi, “And Iran, Iran’s So Far Away,” in Wilcox-Ghanoonparvar, Hyphenated Identities, pp. 24–5.
95 percent of second-generation adolescent Iranian Americans: Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 550, 554–8.
taught that Persian culture is older, richer: Shavarini, Educating Immigrants, p. 113.
“confused as to exactly what constitutes”: Ibid., pp. 112–3; see also Ali Akbar Mahdi, “Ethnic Identity among Second-Generation Iranians in the United States,” Iranian Studies 31, no. 1 (Winter 1998), p. 91 (quoting a young Iranian American respondent in a study), (“I really do not know who an Iranian is. To me Iranian probably means contradiction”).
“All Iranians are successful”: Daha, “Contextual Factors,” p. 560.
“If you don’t get an A”: Ibid., p. 561; see also Mahdi, “Ethnic Identity Among Second-Generation Iranians in the United States,” p. 88 (quoting a respondent in a study of 48 Iranian-American youths as saying “My parents expect too much. They want me to be exceptional”).
“that extra effort to have the bigger house”: Daha, “Contextual Factors,” p. 561; see also Bozorgmehr and Douglas, “Success(ion): Second-Generation Iranian Americans,” p. 5 (second-generation Iranians internalize their parents’ values and become “very motivated to excel in school and to choose professional occupations which will garner them respect”).
“We have to prove it”: Shavarini, Educating Immigrants, p. 6.
bewildering array of caste, regional, ethnic: See Kanti Bajpai, “Diversity, Democracy, and Devolution in India,” in Michael E. Brown and Šumit Ganguly, eds., Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 34–8; see also Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), p. 37; Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 5–6.
great majority of Indian immigrants in America: See Eric Mark Kramer, “Introduction: Assimilation and the Model Minority Ideology,” in Eric Mark Kramer, ed., The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the “Model Minority” (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. xi, xxi (“Most Indians in the United States are upper-class, upper-caste Indians”); see also Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma, eds., New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the U.S. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 13; Vijay Prasad, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New York: The New Press, 2012), pp. 10–1.
A few immigrants from East India: Ramaswami Mahalingam, Cheri Philip, and Sundari Balan, “Cultural Psychology and Marginality: An Explorative Study of Indian Diaspora,” in Ramaswami Mahalingam, ed., Cultural Psychology of Immigrants (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2006), pp. 151, 152.
first significant Indian community . . . was made up of Punjabi Sikhs: Madhulika S. Khandelwal, Becoming American, Being Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 9–10.
initial wave of post-1965 Indian immigrants: Ibid., p. 6; Bandana Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity: Second Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 15–6.
as of 1975, 93 percent: Aparna Rayaprol, Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 15.
Since 1990: Khandelwal, Becoming American, Being Indian, p. 6; Sunaina Marr Maira, Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 10 (“in 1989, 85 percent of Indian immigrants entered under family reunification categories, while only 1 pecent came with occupation-based visas [down from 18 percent in 1969]”).
astonishing 87 percent of adults: Pew Research Center, The Rise of Asian Americans (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, April 4, 2013) (updated edition), p. 44.
“ethnic anxiety”: Maira, Desis in the House, p. 75; see also Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity, p. 93.
the most successful Census-tracked ethnic group: U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 013 – Asian Indian) (estimating median Indian household income of $90,525 as compared to $51,222 for U.S. population overall).
widely agreed that most Indian Americans: See Kramer, “Introduction,” p. xxi; see also Mahalingam, Philip, and Balan, “Cultural Psychology and Marginality,” p. 155 (“most of the current wave of immigrants are from the upper castes”); Prema A. Kurien, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), p. 45 (“Given the elite nature of the migration, we can assume that most Indian Americans are from upper-caste backgrounds. Brahmins seem to be particularly overrepresented”); see also Peter F. Geithner, Paula D. Johnson, and Lincoln C. Chen, eds., Diaspora Philanthropy and Equitable Development in China and India (Cambridge, MA: Global Equity Initiative, Asia Center, Harvard University, 2004), p. 350; Himanee Gupta, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Semiotics of Caste Among Hindu Indians in the United States” (August 2001) (paper presented at 2001 APARRI Conference).
traditional Hindu “castes”: See Dirks, Castes of Mind, pp. 202–3, 221; Dietmar Rothermund, India: The Rise of an Asian Giant (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 162; Rajendra K. Sharma, Indian Society, Institutions, and Change (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004), p. 14.
For centuries, some say millennia: Although the caste system can be traced back thousands of years, some scholars emphasize that “[u]nder colonialism, caste was . . . made out to be far more—far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform—than it had ever been before.” Dirks, Castes of Mind, p. 13; see also Sharma, Indian Society, Institutions, and Change, pp. 11–2, 14–5.
“required to place clay pots”: Narendra Jadhav, Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Escape from India’s Caste System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 1–4; see also Robert Deliège, The Untouchables of India, trans. Nora Scott (Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 1999), pp. 1–3.
“master symbol of their inferiority”: David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics & Power (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 112–3.
Nehru . . . Indira Gandhi: John McLeod, The History of India (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), pp. 185–6.
Tagore: The caste status of the celebrated Tagore, sometimes called India’s Tolstoy, illustrates the arcane but potent role caste traditionally played in India. Although the Tagores were Brahman, they were so-called Pirali Brahman, “unmarriageable by orthodox Hindus” because (according at least to widely accepted lore) their ancestors had been “tainted by contact with Muslims” some time in the fifteenth century. In the early 1800s, a Brahman who merely ate a meal with a Pirali Brahman had to pay 50,000 rupees to regain caste. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), pp. 17–8.
Mohandas Gandhi: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), p. 2.
about a third of the population: Bajpai, “Diversity, Democracy, and Devolution in India,” p. 53; International Institute for Population Sciences, India: National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), 2005-06: (Mumbai, 2007), vol. 1, chap. 3, http://hetv.org/india/nfhs/nfhs3/NFHS-3-India-Full-Report-Volume-I.pdf; 61st National Sample Survey (conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation).
“Just try and check how many brahmins”: “Arundhati Roy in Conversation with Venu Govindu,” October 29, 2000, Friends of River Narmada, http://www.narmada.org/articles/arinterview.html. See also Ramesh Bairy T. S., Being Brahmin, Being Modern: Exploring the Lives of Caste Today (London, New York, and New Delhi: R
outledge, 2010), pp. 85–6 (in the state of Karnataka, Brahmans, although just 4.28 percent of the total population, “continue to be disproportionately represented in the bureaucracy, spaces of higher education, judiciary,” medicine, and engineering).
the Indian Constitution: Constitution of India (1949), art. 15, 17.
deeply ingrained source of superiority: Bairy, Being Brahmin, pp. 87, 280–1; Jadhav, Untouchables, p. 3; Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 79–80.
Bengalis pride themselves: Mark Magnier, “In India, Bengalis Seek to Recapture Their Glory as Intellectuals,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 8, 2012.
Bengali Brahman families: “Amartya Sen,” Indians Abroad, indobase.com, http://www.indobase.com/indians-abroad/amartya-sen.html; Reshmi R. Dasgupta, “I Had No Idea a Pulitzer Was So Prestigious, Says Pulitzer Prize Winner Siddhartha Mukerjee’s Father,” The Economic Times (India), Apr. 22, 2011; see also Maxine P. Fisher, The Indians of New York City: A Study of Immigrants from India (Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1980), p. 49 (noting that Bengali names ending with “ji” as in “Mukerji” or “Banerji” are “those of Brahmins”).
Gujaratis: Pawan Dhingra, Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 4–5, 14; Marjorie Howard, “A Motel of One’s Own,” Tufts Now, Nov. 27, 2012; Nimish Shukla, “16 Gujaratis in Forbes List,” The Times of India, Mar. 8, 2008.
two of the top three: “Bhai is king: Gujaratis are ruling Forbes 40 richest Indians list,” Nov. 14, 2008, DeshGujarat.com, http://deshgujarat.com/2008/11/14/bhai-is-king-gujaratis-are-ruling-forbes-40-richest-indians-list.
who number about 200,000: Pew Research Center, “How Many U.S. Sikhs?,” Aug. 6, 2012, http://www.pewresearch.org/2012/08/06/ask-the-expert-how-many-us-sikhs/.
Sikhs . . . have their own superiority: Ved Mehta, Rajiv Ghandi and Rama’s Kingdom (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 65; see Dawinder S. Sidhu and Neha Singh Gohil, Civil Rights in Wartime: The Post 9/11 Sikh Experience (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), p. 51 (quoting Prabhjot Singh) (describing the Sikh turban as “a manifestation of the mission given to all Sikhs—to act as a divine prince or princess by standing firm against tyranny and protecting the downtrodden”); D. H. Butani, The Third Sikh War? Towards or Away from Khalistan? (New Delhi: Promilla & Co., 1986), p. 26.
