Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  The U.S. military may be the best example. When President Harry Truman first issued Executive Order 9981 to integrate the U.S. armed forces, popular opinion was strongly against him; nearly two thirds of white servicemen opposed desegregation of the military, and the American public agreed by a similar margin. Internal opposition was so widespread that the army dragged its feet and ignored their commander in chief’s order for as long as possible, hoping Dewey would best him in the 1948 election.

  Truman won, of course, and integration efforts proceeded. And in 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, researchers published a study on the effectiveness of desegregated units. To the surprise of many, they discovered that “cooperation in integrated units was equal or superior to that of all-White units.” As Conrad Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, recounted, “When your life depends on your buddy, the color of their skin tends to become less important; it’s how good they are.”

  This proved true in Vietnam as well. Karl Marlantes, a marine lieutenant, recalls being on a remote jungle hilltop in Vietnam in 1968 and being asked by Ray Delgado, “an 18-year old Hispanic kid from Texas,” if he wanted to try a tamale from a care package that Ray’s mother had sent him. Marlantes said, “Sure,” but found the tamale very tough to eat.

  “Lieutenant,” Ray finally said. “You take the corn husk off.”

  I was from a logging town on the Oregon coast. I’d heard of tamales, but I’d never seen one. Until I joined my company of Marines in Vietnam, I’d never even talked to a Mexican.

  In Marlantes’s view, “not everything about the war was negative. . . . I saw how it threw together young men from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and forced them to trust one another with their lives. . . . If I was pinned down by enemy fire and I needed an M-79 man, I’d scream for Thompson, because he was the best. I didn’t even think about what color Thompson was.”

  For Marlantes and many others, the experience of interacting, living, and working with members of other ethnic and racial groups had a profound effect:

  White guys had to listen to soul music and black guys had to listen to country music. We didn’t fear one another. And the experience stuck with us. Hundreds of thousands of young men came home from Vietnam with different ideas about race—some for the worse, but most for the better. Racism wasn’t solved in Vietnam, but I believe it was where our country finally learned that it just might be possible for us all to get along.

  A more recent example is the astonishing transformation in Americans’ opinions about same-sex marriage. As recently as 1988, support in the United States for same-sex marriage was just 11 percent; today, 62 percent support it. Many factors contributed to this shift, but one of the most important was simple. In 2013, 75 percent of Americans reported having “a friend, relative, or coworker who has revealed to them that he or she is gay”—up from only 24 percent in 1985. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—whose votes on the Supreme Court helped bring about marriage equality—described this change in a 2014 interview: “Once [gay] people began to say who they were,” she said, “you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired.”

  It’s crucial to emphasize that mere exposure to people from different tribes is not sufficient. On the contrary, studies show that minimal or superficial exposure to out-group members can actually worsen group division. One study by Harvard professor Ryan Enos found that simply being exposed to two men speaking Spanish on a train led commuters—most of whom were white and liberal—to have significantly more conservative attitudes on immigration. Unsurprisingly, negative interactions with people from other groups also increase group hostility. So merely putting members of different groups in the same space is not enough and indeed can aggravate political tribalism.

  Instead, what is needed is one-on-one human engagement, which is hard precisely because of how divided we are. But anything worth achieving is difficult. When people from different tribes see one another as human beings who at the end of the day want the same things—kindness, dignity, security for loved ones—hearts can change. As a Coptic priest in New York put it, “[H]umility is a mediator. It will always be the shortest distance between you and another person.”

  Speaking of distances between people, Yale University, where I’ve taught for fifteen years, has, along with other liberal colleges, been much mocked and decried of late, and in some ways I understand why. Over the last several years, I have sometimes watched with dismay as a tiny but highly vocal handful of students use their privileged positions not to foster the free exchange of ideas but to shame and punish—almost invariably at no cost to themselves—tearing apart the student community and driving dissenters underground, where resentment only festers. But I have also seen with my own eyes over and over the very best of America, practically miracles.

  I’ve taught a seminar where the daughter of an undocumented worker from Mexico and the son of a cop from New Hampshire started off hating each other and ended up loving each other. I’ve watched as a third-generation Holocaust survivor and an organizer of the anti-Israeli boycott movement struggled to understand each other, and ultimately agreed to disagree, without friendship, but without venom—baby steps. I’ve seen a former Navy SEAL and a human rights activist bond over Trivial Pursuit. I’ve seen a talented black poet—who spent eight years in prison because of a carjacking he did at sixteen before coming to Yale—win the admiration and awe of opponents of Black Lives Matter with his grace and empathy.

  —

  But even this is not enough. Remaining a super-group requires something more. It’s not enough that we view one another as fellow human beings; we need to view one another as fellow Americans. And for that we need to collectively find a national identity capacious enough to resonate with, and hold together as one people, Americans of all sorts—old and young, immigrant and native born, urban and rural, descendants of slaves as well as descendants of slave owners.

  It’s not clear whether this is possible in our time of rage. A political meme popular among Trump supporters during the 2016 election cycle showed European immigrants from the early twentieth century with the following text overlaid: “THEY CAME TO TAKE PART IN THE AMERICAN DREAM. EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS BUILT THIS NATION. THEY DIDN’T COME TO BITCH, COLLECT WELFARE, WAGE JIHAD, AND REPLACE THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION WITH SHARIA LAW.” This is tribalism. It creates within America a virtuous Us and a demonized Them. To put it mildly, this vision of the American Dream isn’t going to be acceptable for half the country—nor is it intended to be.

  But the same can be said of the other side. A progressive headline after the 2016 election read “‘WHITE WORKING CLASS’ NARRATIVE IS NOTHING BUT A RACIST DOG WHISTLE”—a widely held view. A political blog post titled “America: Land of the Oppressed, Home of the Cowards” asserts that “America is neither the land of the free nor the home of the brave. It is the land of oppression [for] everyone other than rich, white, Christian males.” According to the filmmaker Michael Moore, the United States is “a nation founded on genocide and on the backs of slaves.” And Toni Morrison, one of America’s most beloved novelists, wrote, “Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force.” Sadly, there’s a grain of truth to what Moore and Morrison say. But if America is nothing more than a land of oppression, founded on nothing more than genocide and white supremacy, it’s hard to see why America is worth fighting for.

  Today’s purveyors of political tribalism, on both left and right, may think they are defending American values, but in fact they are playing with poison. America will cease to be America—and will no longer be a super-group—if we define our national identity in terms of “whiteness,” “Anglo-Protestant culture,” “European Christianity,” or any other terms not inclusive of all religions and ethnicities. But it will also cease to be America if enough of us come to believe that our country and its ideals are a fraud. There is a world
of difference between saying that America has failed to live up to its own ideals, with egregious injustice persisting today, and saying that the principles supposedly uniting us are just smoke screens to disguise oppression.

  The peril we face as a nation today is not only that America might fail to live up to its promise, but that Americans might stop believing in that promise or the need to fight for it. The increasing belief on the left that this promise was always a lie, or on the right that it has always been true—and has already been achieved—are two sides of the same coin.

  —

  A few months after the 2016 election, a student said to me one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever heard. Giovanni came from the humblest origins. As a child, he lived with his Mexican American family in an old taco truck before they moved up to an eighteen-hundred-dollar motor home. He told me about a retired white couple from rural Louisiana, whom I’ll call Walter and Lee Ann Jones, who lived in the same Texas trailer park as Giovanni’s family. According to Giovanni, the Joneses were extremely kind from day one: “Walter helped us set up the taco truck and would bring my sister and me sweets from the local food pantry, where he volunteered to haul food with his pickup truck. Multiple Thanksgivings, Walter ensured my family had a turkey and sides to cook, which he also brought from the pantry. Walter also loved guns and made it known that he would protect us if anyone caused any trouble. ‘There’s a lot of bad people here, but I dare them to try and mess with you. They will regret it.’”

  But a decade later, during the 2016 election cycle, Giovanni realized, based on a number of social media posts made by the Joneses, that Walter and Lee Ann held strongly racist attitudes. In Giovanni’s view, however, the Joneses exemplify “a critical paradox that progressives often overlook or dismiss, to their own detriment.” Despite their racist attitudes toward “faceless brown people generally,” the Joneses “treat my family with nothing but love and respect, despite our Mexican descent and immigrant status. In fact, the Joneses even consider my sister and me to be their adoptive-grandkids. Furthermore, the food pantry where Walter volunteered primarily served the black community. On multiple occasions, I observed first-hand the joy it brought Walter to help these communities.”

  I found Giovanni’s story striking first because he was talking about racism in a way that is completely taboo among progressives (a group he identifies with). Among progressives, once someone is deemed racist, that’s it. You can’t talk to him, you can’t compromise, and you certainly can’t suggest that he might be a decent person just because he’s nice to a few minorities. (Liberal eyes start rolling as soon as the “racist” mentions his “black friends.”) I also found the story striking because of a further insight Giovanni offered: the Joneses didn’t think of themselves as racists. In their minds, “the countless iterations of treating minorities with decency and kindness is undeniable evidence that they are not racist.” As a result, when liberals call them “bigots,” they feel unjustly attacked, creating a chasm of anger. “When the conviction that they are morally blameless clashes with liberal outrage, it drives a wedge between elite progressives and the working-class people they ostensibly desire to help.”

  Finally, I found the story remarkable because it reflected a generosity in scarce supply these days. In case it’s not clear, the Joneses were Trump supporters, whereas Giovanni viewed Trump as a deep, visceral threat to his family and his community. Yet he was willing to reach across the tribal divide, out of a belief in a shared humanity and a sense of coming from the same place, the same America—in Giovanni’s case, a trailer park in Texas where people helped one another get by.

  If we’re to come together as a nation, we all need to elevate ourselves. We need to find a way to talk to each other if we’re to have any chance of bridging divides. We need to allow ourselves to see our tribal adversaries as fellow Americans, engaged in a common enterprise.

  Those who are worried about terrorism should be able to express that worry without being branded an Islamophobe. Those who view America’s seismic demographic changes and massive influx of immigrants with anxiety should be able to express that anxiety without being branded a racist. Transformational population change is dislocating, and diversity has costs. But we’ve been through this before. Over and over, throughout American history, waves of new immigrants have come to our shores, always met with suspicion and fear that the nation’s character will be endangered, its streets made unsafe, its values lost. Every time, we’ve overcome this fear, prospered, and grown stronger.

  With every wave of immigration in the past, American freedom and openness have triumphed. Will we, telling ourselves “These immigrants are different,” be the weak link, the first generation to fail? Will we forget who we are?

  At the same time, those committed to exposing the grotesque injustices of America’s past and present—they are right too, and doing us all a service. No country can be great if it can’t be honest, and America, in particular, with its resounding constitutional principles, needs to be held to its own standards or fall under the weight of hypocrisy. But other generations seeking justice have done so for the promise of America. Even as James Baldwin lacerated the “collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes,” he made clear that his dream was to “achieve our country,” “to make America what America must become,” for “great men have done great things here, and will again.” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that African Americans sitting at whites-only lunch counters were “standing up for the best in the American dream.” At a service honoring Dr. King, President Barack Obama said of the leaders of the civil rights movement, “[A]s much as our Government and our political parties had betrayed them in the past, as much as our Nation itself had betrayed its own ideals . . . [t]hey didn’t give up on this country. . . . Imperfect as it was, they continued to believe in the promise of democracy, in America’s constant ability to remake itself, to perfect this Union.”

  —

  In the blockbuster Broadway hit play Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda brilliantly used an all-minority cast to portray America’s Founding Fathers. This was a radical—and radically patriotic—move.

  Hamilton doesn’t deny American racism or injustice. On the contrary, the pointed casting draws attention to those historically excluded from center stage in the nation’s creation, and reminds us that America’s ideals always far exceeded its reality. But the play is also a reminder that this country’s history is built on principles that transcend their time. It testifies to the aspiration that every American, regardless of ethnicity or race, can embrace the nation’s history and identity as his or her own. It gives voice to an America that is not rooted in blood or parentage, that is open to people of all different ethnicities, and that allows—indeed, gains strength from allowing—all those subgroup identities to flourish. It speaks for the idea of America as a super-group.

  What holds the United States together is the American Dream. But it must be a version of the dream that recognizes past failure instead of denying it. Failures are part and parcel of the story line of a country founded on hope, a country where there’s always more to be done.

  Dreams are not real, but they can be made so. The American Dream is a promise of freedom and hope for every individual on these shores. But it is also a call on all of us to make true the myths we tell ourselves about what America has always been. More than anyone else, Langston Hughes was the poet of this dream. In his 1935 poem “Let America Be America Again,” he writes:

  Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

  Let it be that great strong land of love.

  But then a second voice enters:

  (It never was America to me.)

  The first voice replies:

  Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

  And the second answers:

  I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

  I am t
he Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

  I am the red man driven from the land,

  I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

  And finding only the same old stupid plan

  Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

  But far from concluding with defeat, Hughes offers a prayer and an affirmation:

  O, let America be America again—

  The land that never has been yet—

  And yet must be—the land where every man is free. . . .

  O, yes,

  I say it plain,

  America never was America to me,

  And yet I swear this oath—

  America will be!

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply indebted to two extraordinary women: my agent, Tina Bennett, and my editor, Ann Godoff. I have no idea how I got so lucky. Many thanks also to Casey Denis, Sarah Hutson, and the rest of the fabulous team at Penguin.

  This book reflects the invaluable help of numerous Yale Law School students. In particular, I would like to thank Bill Powell for reading the manuscript in its entirety and offering fabulous critiques and edits, as well as Yusef Al-Jarani, Joe Chatham, Aislinn Klos, Taonga Leslie, and Giovanni Sanchez for their critical insights and editorial help. This book would not have been possible without the dozens, in some cases hundreds, of hours of outstanding research assistance provided by Jeanine Alvarez, Eric Brooks, Eric Chung, Greg Cui, Meredith Foster, Matteo Godi, Jordan Goldberg, Kim Jackson, Dan Listwa, Josh Macey, Alex Mahler-Haug, Brian McGrail, David Miller, Adeel Mohammadi, Andy Mun, Matt Nguyen, Wazhma Sadat, Spencer Todd, Alex Wang, Sarah Weiner, Rachel Wilf, Ryan Yeh, and Nathaniel Zelinsky. I am also grateful to the following students for their assistance on particular chapters: Danielle Abada, Sam Adkisson, Laith Aqel, Leslie Arffa, Omer Aziz, Denisha Bacchus, Janine Balekjdian, Bianca Bamgbade, Emily Barreca, Andrea Basaraba, Jordan Blashek, Humza Bokhari, Hal Boyd, Sam Breidbart, John Brinkerhoff, Matt Butler, Luis Calderon Gomez, Katie Choi, Matt Chou, Michael Chung, Ali Cooper-Ponte, Catherine Crooke, Colleen Culbertson, Samir Doshi, Rhea Fernandes, Shikka Garg, Mario Gazzola, Pardis Gheibi, Ben Hand, Amber Koonce, Josh Handelsman, Rhoda Hassan, Yasin Hegazy, Jordan Hirsch, Julia Hu, Eri Kalu, Stephen Karp, Louis Katz, Amber Koonce, Aaron Korthuis, Hilary Ledwell, Yena Lee, Elizabeth Leiserson, Brandon Levin, Aaron Levine, Miranda Li, Ellis Liang, Alina Lindblom, Athie Livas, Webb Lyons, Danielle Marryshow, Heath Mayo, Emma McDermott, Andrew Miller, Nick Molina, Blake Neal, Iulia Padeanu, Jenna Pavalec, Aaron Roper, Theo Rostow, Eugene Rusyn, Ram Sachs, Bella Schapiro, Joe Schottenfeld, Alex Schultz, Reema Shah, Max Siegel, Javier Sinha, Sean Song, Mitzi Steiner, Tori Stilwell, Paul Strauch, Styna Tao, Brandon Thomas, Todd Venook, Julia Wang, Michael Weaver, Zoe Weinberg, Helen White, Ethan Wong, Ben Woodring, Tian Tian Xin, Alice Xiang, Bo-Shan Xiang, Alyssa Yamamoto, Victor Yu, Danyang Zhao, and David Zhou.