by Amy Chua
In the 1960s, the Black Power, “Black Is Beautiful,” Black Panther, Nation of Islam, and Afrocentrism movements sought to reclaim black history and rewrite racial narratives, often turning the tables on white superiority, even claiming the mantle of divine chosenness. Malcolm X, when still a follower of the Nation of Islam, urged blacks to believe
not only that we’re as good as the White man, but better than the White man. . . . That’s not saying anything . . . just to be equal with him. Who is he to be equal with? You look at his skin. You can’t compare your skin with his skin. Why, your skin looks like gold beside his skin.
Louis Farrakhan would say in 1985, “I declare to the world that the people of God are not those who call themselves Jews, but the people of God who are chosen at this critical time in history is you, the black people of America.”
Martin Luther King was surely right when he said that “black supremacy,” which he saw in the teachings of the Nation of Islam, would be just “as dangerous as white supremacy.” But the fact of the matter is that America’s most successful groups are cashing in on superiority stories they still believe in and still pass down to their children. This is an advantage that was denied to African Americans—and continues to be denied to them today.
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CAN THE EFFECT of a superiority complex be tested empirically? It has been, and the results dramatically confirm that such complexes lift achievement.
Beginning with the pioneering “stereotype threat” studies conducted by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, hundreds of controlled experiments have now shown that people’s performance on all kinds of measures is dramatically affected by their belief that they’re doing something their group is stereotypically good or bad at. Merely reminding people of a negative group stereotype—sometimes even just by requiring them to identify their race or gender on a questionnaire before a test—can worsen their performance.
Thus black students score lower on standardized test questions when their test instructions remind them about stereotypes concerning differential racial performance on such tests. White male Stanford students specially selected for high math ability scored worse on a difficult math test when told that the researchers were trying to understand “the phenomenal math achievement of Asians.” Women chess players lost more online games when reminded that men dominate chess rankings—provided they believed they were playing a man (the effect disappeared when they were falsely told their opponent was another woman).
Researchers have also established the opposite effect: stereotype boost. For example, women performed better at visual rotation when told that the task tested a “perspective-taking” skill that women were expected to perform well on (but worse when told that the task was “spatial” and that women were not expected to excel). In a laboratory-controlled miniature golf experiment—we’re not making this up—whites did better when the putting test was described as measuring “sports intelligence” than when told that it measured “natural athletic ability.” Asian undergraduates scored significantly better on math questions when their instructions stated that “these types of tests measure individuals’ true intellectual ability, which historically have shown differences based on ethnic heritage.” Crucially, this effect held only for those Asian students who “strongly identified” with their ethnic heritage; for those who didn’t, the instruction made little or no difference.
Outside the laboratory, in-depth studies of Asian and Hispanic American high schoolers in Southern California found that Asian students were profiting from a stereotype lift. In a study including Vietnamese as well as Chinese American students, sociologists Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee found that, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, positive stereotypes and ingrained expectations about superior Asian academic achievement—both internal to the culture of these groups and widespread in society at large—significantly contributed to the exceptional academic outcomes of the children of Asian American immigrants.
Since Steele and Aronson published their early findings in 1995, stereotype threat and boost have been among the most widely studied phenomena in social psychology. Perhaps the most astonishing finding in these studies is the susceptibility of individuals to even a single, one-sentence, subtle suggestion of a group stereotype. Imagine, then, the boost you might derive if belief in your group’s superiority were part of the culture you grew up in, instilled by your parents, grandparents, and community from the day you were born.
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THE CULTURAL BURDEN BORNE by African Americans—along with their susceptibility to stereotype threat—is thrown into sharp relief by the fact that black immigrants are often free of it, at least when they first arrive. In her gripping memoir The House at Sugar Beach, the New York Times journalist Helene Cooper, a Liberian American, describes the choice made by her ancestors, free American-born blacks, to leave the United States for Liberia—a choice she sees as having armed her, by sheer fortuity of birthplace, with a worldview different from that of many American blacks:
Because of that choice, I would not grow up, 150 years later, as an American black girl, weighed down by racial stereotypes about welfare queens. . . . Instead, [they] handed down to me a one-in-a-million lottery ticket: birth into what passed for the landed gentry upper class of Africa’s first independent country, Liberia. None of that American post–civil war/civil rights movement baggage to bog me down with any inferiority complex about whether I was as good as white people. No European garbage to have me wondering whether some British colonial master was somehow better than me. Who needs to struggle for equality? Let everybody else try to be equal to me.
Culturally and psychologically, “let everyone else try to be equal to me” is worlds apart from “I’m just as good as other people.” It’s the expression of a superiority complex, and in a society where negative stereotypes are widespread, the confidence it confers on a minority group can be extremely valuable.
This is certainly true of Nigerian Americans. Among West Africans, the stereotype of Nigerians as “arrogant” is common. But the overwhelming majority of Nigerian Americans are not merely Nigerian. They are Igbo or Yoruba, two peoples renowned—and often resented—throughout Western Africa for being disproportionately successful and ethnocentric. The Yoruba boast an illustrious royal lineage and a once great empire. Upstarts by comparison, the entrepreneurial Igbo are often called the “Jews of West Africa.” Chinua Achebe, the late Igbo-Nigerian author and winner of the Man Booker Prize, warned of the “dangers of hubris,” “overweening pride,” and “showiness” among the Igbo—and of other Nigerians’ “resentment” against them.
Because of these superiority narratives, the theory of the Triple Package would predict that black immigrants should be able to fend off negative stereotypes better than African Americans can. Again, empirical evidence confirms this result. In a recent study of more than 1,800 students at twenty-eight American selective colleges, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors, first- and second-generation black immigrant students did not suffer the same stereotype-threat effects that American black students did. And as many similar studies have shown, the more strongly black immigrant students identify with their specific ethnic origins, the better they perform.
Newcomers from Africa and the West Indies frequently point to what they perceive as defeatism among African Americans, identifying this mind-set as an obstacle to black success. In the words of one business-school graduate, born in the United States to two Nigerian parents:
Perception is very important, and I think that is what holds African-Americans back. If you start thinking about or becoming absorbed in the mentality that the whole system is against us, then you cannot succeed. . . . Nigerians do not have this. I feel that Nigerians coming from Nigeria feel they are capable of anything. . . . [T]hey don’t feel they can’t do chemistry or engineering or anything because they are Black.
Superiority complexes can be invidious, but in a so
ciety rife with prejudice they can also provide what sociologists have described as “an ethnic armor” enabling some minorities “to cope psychologically, even in the face of discrimination and exclusion.”
Helene Cooper had this kind of armor. She experienced numerous racist episodes after arriving in South Carolina as a fourteen-year-old. What made her proof against them, as she tells her story, was the internalized sense of superiority she brought with her from Liberia, where her family belonged to the elite “Congo people,” descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the country, as distinct from the “Country people,” a derogatory term for “native” Liberians. On top of that, her family were “Honorables,” an even higher distinction. “You could have a Ph.D. from Harvard but if you were a Country man . . . you were still outranked in Liberian society by an Honorable with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee.” Thus when Cooper’s freshman roommate, “a white girl from Seagrove, North Carolina, who didn’t want to room with a black girl,” transferred out of their room, Cooper “called my father and told him, and we both laughed about it on the phone. I felt no outrage. . . . It was completely incomprehensible to me that she could be that much of an idiot.”
The way Cooper warded off the blows of American racism—fending off one brand of ethnocentrism with another—is surprisingly common among America’s disproportionately successful groups. Especially among minorities, this strategy tends to function much more as a defensive shield of self-protection than as a weapon of contempt against others.
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TO CONCLUDE, every one of America’s disproportionately successful groups has a deeply ingrained superiority complex, whether rooted in theology, history, or imported social hierarchies that most Americans know nothing about. If a disproportionately successful group could be found in the United States without a superiority complex, that would be a counterexample, undercutting the Triple Package thesis.
But superiority complexes are hard to maintain. As one generation passes to the next, group identity and ethnic pride come under attack. All the forces of assimilation work against it, including the homogenizing pull of American culture. For racial minorities, there will be the additional assaults of prejudice and discrimination. America’s ideals of equality will come into play as well, eroding superiority claims. Second- and third-generation Americans may begin (perhaps correctly) to see their parents’ superiority complex as bigoted or racist and reject it for that reason. As nature abhors a vacuum, so America abhors a superiority complex—except its own. Yet disproportionate success in the United States comes to groups who, in the face of these pressures, find a way to maintain belief in their own superiority.
Superiority alone, however, is merely complacent. The titled nobility of Victorian England had plenty of superiority but were not famously hardworking; even when in financial straits, they would have found employment or entrepreneurship contemptible. For this reason, important as they are, the stereotype boost experiments capture only a piece of the Triple Package dynamic. Only when superiority comes together with the other elements of the Triple Package does it generate drive, grit, and systematic disproportionate group success.
CHAPTER 4
INSECURITY
WE TURN NOW TO the second component of the Triple Package, insecurity.
It’s been almost two hundred years since the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville noticed a peculiar difference between America and Europe. There were places in the “Old World,” he said, where the people, though largely uneducated, poor, and oppressed, “seem serene and often have a jovial disposition.” By contrast, in America, where “the freest” men lived “in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world,” people were “anxious and on edge.” They were “insatiable.” They never stopped working—first at one thing, then another; first in one place, then another. Americans suffered, said Tocqueville, from a “secret restlessness.”
The anxiety Tocqueville described was not spiritual; nor was it a mere wanderlust, a craving for new experiences; much less was it what a future era would call existential. It was material: Americans wanted more. “All are constantly bent on gaining property, reputation, and power.” They “never stop thinking of the good things they have not got,” always “looking doggedly” at others who have more than they. This thirst for more prevented them from enjoying what they did possess, distracting them from the happiness they ought to have felt, placing them under a “cloud.” Ultimately, Americans’ anxiety was connected to their “longing to rise.”
In short, Tocqueville was describing a people in the grip of insecurity in precisely the sense we have in mind: a goading anxiety about oneself and one’s place in society, which in certain circumstances can become a powerful engine of material striving.
Everyone is probably insecure to some extent. Insecurity may be fundamental to the human condition, an inevitable product of the knowledge of mortality or self-consciousness itself. Perhaps this is why people who are insecure are often described as “self-conscious.” But insecurity is not all or nothing. You can be more or less insecure, and you can be insecure about different kinds of things. Nor is insecurity a fixed and stable quantum throughout a person’s life. Most people are much more insecure during adolescence, for example.
Above all, you don’t need to be a member of any particular group to be insecure. But certainly it isn’t true any longer, if it ever was, that all Americans feel the goading, insatiable longing to work and rise that Tocqueville described. Some groups’ insecurities differ from others, in both kind and intensity.
The great puzzle for Tocqueville was why Americans should feel insecure “in the midst of their prosperity.” We’ll return to this question later. Here, we want to take a closer look at the particular anxieties of America’s successful groups. With striking frequency and remarkable consistency, members of these groups are afflicted with certain distinctive insecurities that—in combination with insecurity’s seeming opposite, a superiority complex—are especially likely to fuel a drive toward acquisitive, material, prestige-oriented success.
Among the most powerful sources of these insecurities are scorn, fear, and family. We’ll discuss these in turn.
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SCORN IS A LEGENDARY MOTIVATOR. (“Hell hath no fury,” as the playwright William Congreve didn’t quite put it.) All of America’s disproportionately successful groups are strangely united in this respect: each is or has been looked down on in America, treated with derision, disrespect, or suspicion. Every one of them suffers—or at least used to suffer, when on the rise—scorn-based insecurity. And to be scorned socially can create a powerful urge to rise socially. Everything can be borne but contempt, said Voltaire.
Scorn, contempt, and above all resentment: these levers of motivation, so well-known in literature, are wholly uncaptured by the useful but bland terms “human capital” and “social capital.” In explaining the Cuban American success story, it’s invariably pointed out that the Cuban Exiles brought with them considerable “human capital,” much more than most other Hispanic immigrants. Which of course was true: about a third of the first wave of Cuban immigrants (the so-called Golden Exiles) had been elites in Cuba, already trained as professionals and executives. But their Cuban degrees and résumés typically counted for little in the United States, where they were forced to take any work they could find, whether semiskilled or unskilled, as factory hands or domestic servants.
Among the groups with the highest human and social capital in the United States are surely the “blue-blooded” WASPs, who still populate America’s finest boarding schools and have old-boy networks going back generations. But as members of this class themselves often observe, a culture of lassitude, of nonstriving, seems to have set in at the upper echelons of WASP society. The “less-advertised corollary” to the Protestant work ethic, writes Tad Friend, “held that if you were born to success, nothing further was required.” (Acc
ording to one of Friend’s cousins, “it was customary for the top executives, most of whom had inherited their wealth, to leave their offices between half past three and four; and Father, having spent the morning reading the newspapers, would join them for backgammon, bridge, billiards, and alcohol.”) A culture that “once valued education, ability and striving,” adds Peter Sayles, “now looks upon these qualities as optional accoutrements. Intellectualism is also frowned upon within these circles—that’s for Jews and nerds.” After “generations of affluence,” says an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, “[l]ots of people just got lazy.”
Laziness was something the Cuban Exiles could not afford, either economically or psychologically. Humiliated by Castro, who had called them “the scum of the Earth and worthless worms,” many of the Cuban émigrés felt an almost personal mission to prove Castro and Communism wrong by making good in the land of the free. As one Exile puts it, “prevailing in the economic arena” to “bolster their wounded collective pride” became for Cuban Americans “an ideological quest.” At the same time, they encountered in Florida the unexpected contempt of discrimination. “When we first arrived in Miami,” another Exile remembers, “there were signs on the doors of many houses for rent that said NO DOGS, NO CUBANS. After reading a sign like that, you can imagine how I felt. I had never been discriminated against.”
The Exiles’ plummet in status was itself an additional blow and extra goad. A successful Cuban American professor—whose childhood memories include a mansion in Havana with a private amusement park in its backyard—describes what it was like for her father to work as a waiter in Miami. “Many times while at work at a restaurant or hotel my father would run into people who knew him back when he was worth millions. It was very embarrassing for him to work in these menial positions, but the embarrassment just propelled him to work harder.”