Infamous tiger mom Amy Chua’s amusingly-named forthcoming book, “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America,” injects hot air aplenty into the culture war debates. In “The Triple Package,” Chua claims that eight specific groups — Mormons, Nigerians, Chinese, Cuban exiles, American Jews, Indians, Lebanese-Americans and Iranians — share three specific traits that lead to personal success: a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control. Outraged critics from Gawker to the New York Post have accused Chua of “trolling,” promoting eugenics, racism and other despicable ideas and attitudes. Though Chua’s reasoning has its flaws, pointing to cultural attitudes as the reasons for individual success is not racist.
The basic idea that differing cultural attitudes and practices can lead to visible differences in material and social outcomes between groups is not unreasonable. Differences between genetically similar but culturally different groups (for example, the Igbo and the Yoruba in Nigeria) are the norm, not the exception, throughout history. Similarly, members of a religious organization that explicitly prohibits the use of alcohol and narcotics are likely to lead healthier, more productive and therefore more successful lives — as data suggests is true for Mormons, who, on average, live long lives.
Since culture and race are not identical concepts, there’s nothing racist about Chua’s observations, and her argument cannot be said to promote “racial superiority.” For example, African-Americans descended from slaves of the Igbo ethnicity and more recent Nigerian Igbo immigrants — two groups with wildly divergent levels of economic success in the U.S. — are of the same “race,” yes, but different cultural backgrounds. Here, that’s what counts. Culture and race are separate things that can often be related, but still must be distinguished from one another.
What Chua misses, though, is that immigrants — who comprise the majority of most groups that Chua singles out for excellence — typically tend to be different people from those of the same background who choose not to immigrate. In many cases, they are professionals and wealthy people fleeing political and economic instability in their home countries — the “brain drain” that affects numerous poor countries and even wealthy countries like Israel. Such immigrants are not only qualified for high-paying jobs, but their children will often go to better schools and have better connections than the average American.
More importantly, it takes a special type of person to set out from your homeland for a place where you have few or no relatives or connections, where you aren’t fluent in the local language and where you may not have secured employment. Except for refugees and other special cases, most potential immigrants are more inclined than their neighbors to seek opportunities to advance themselves and their families, even at the risk of personal ruin.
These sorts of individuals will succeed in America, regardless of creed or nationality. Before enterprising Chinese or Nigerians immigrated to America, Swedish immigrants braved harsh conditions to settle as farmers on Minnesota’s plains. Germans contributed to the military, manufacturing and material sciences. Japanese immigrants overcame brutal discrimination during World War II to become one of America’s wealthiest ethnic groups. The 2006-2010 American Community Survey found that all three of the aforementioned groups boasted higher median incomes than the U.S. median. Nonetheless, Chua seems to have passed them over in favor of a handful of cherry-picked groups that loosely conform to the particular mold that she considers the foundation of American success.
While neither this oversight nor Chua’s premises should be chalked up to racially or similarly motivated prejudice, they do undermine the credibility of her overall argument. Still, there are some lessons to be learned from her attempts to highlight successful groups in American society. Community and culture, which help promote good personal habits, affect individual success, and some of the groups singled out by Chua are admirable for their achievements. But of course, they are not the only factors contributing to success in a self-styled “land of opportunity” like the United States.
