Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  Julian Aiken, Lora Johns, Sarah Kraus, Michael VanderHeijden, and many others on the Yale Law School Library staff awed me with their energy and resourcefulness; I cannot thank them enough for their patience and indulgence. Rosanna Gonsiewski was also fabulous and indispensable.

  Many thanks to my brilliant colleagues Tony Kronman, Daniel Markovits, and John Witt for their incisive comments; Andrew Chesnut, Mina Cikara, Jay Van Bavel, and Robb Willer for reviewing chapters; and Sophia and Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld for their conceptual and editing help.

  As always, my greatest debt is to my husband, Jed Rubenfeld, who for thirty years now has read every word I’ve written. I continue to be the fortunate beneficiary of his generosity and genius.

  Notes

  Introduction

  monks and friars: For an erudite discussion of group dynamics among Benedictine and Franciscan monks, see Ulrich L. Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740–1803 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially 2, 32, 40–41.

  instinct to exclude: See Matthew J. Hornsey and Jolanda Jetten, “The Individual within the Group: Balancing the Need to Belong with the Need to Be Different,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (2004): 248–64; Geoffrey J. Leonardelli and Marilynn B. Brewer, “Minority and Majority Discrimination: When and Why,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 37, no. 6 (2001): 468–85; Marilynn B. Brewer, “When Contact Is Not Enough: Social Identity and Intergroup Cooperation,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 20, nos. 3/4 (1996): 291–303.

  They will seek: See Yarrow Dunham, Andrew Scott Barron, and Susan Carey, “Consequences of ‘Minimal’ Group Affiliations in Children,” Child Development 82, no. 3 (2011): 793, 797–802, 807–8; see also Henri Tajfel et al., “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behaviour,” European Journal of Social Psychology 1, no. 2 (1971): 149–78.

  They will penalize: See Dunham, Barron, and Carey, “Consequences of ‘Minimal’ Group Affiliations in Children,” 797–801, 807–8; see also Muzafer Sherif et al., The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 144–48.

  greatest and most humiliating: See Joe Allen, Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 1; Louis B. Zimmer, The Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. Morgenthau and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), xv, 2.

  underestimated the extent: See, e.g., Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 24, 179–80; transcript of The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, directed by Errol Morris (Hollywood, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2003), http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html (Lesson 7); Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), epilogue; Thomas Friedman, “ISIS and Vietnam,” New York Times, October 28, 2014.

  resented 1 percent Chinese minority: Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 33–34; Frank H. Golay et al., Underdevelopment and Economic Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), chapter 7; Tran Khanh, The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 79–84; James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945–2010 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 47.

  70 to 80 percent: Chua, World on Fire, 33–34; Golay et al., Underdevelopment and Economic Nationalism in Southeast Asia, chapter 7; Khanh, The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, 80–81; Pao-min Chang, Beijing, Hanoi, and the Overseas Chinese (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1982), 4, 16; Alexander Woodside, “Nationalism and Poverty in the Breakdown of Sino-Vietnamese Relations,” Pacific Affairs 52, no. 3 (1979): 405.

  Vietnam’s “capitalists” were: Chua, World on Fire, 33–34; Li Tana, “In Search of the History of the Chinese in South Vietnam, 1945–75,” in The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People, ed. Yuk Wah Chan (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 53; Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 379–80.

  “We didn’t probably understand fully”: Condoleezza Rice, interview by Bill Hemmer, Fox News, May 5, 2017, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/05/05/condoleezza-rice-discusses-north-korea-russia-with-bill-hemmer.html (at 22:50).

  American policy in Iraq: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2009), 11–12, 21, 274.

  A handful of critics: For example, Ryan Crocker, who a decade later became ambassador to Iraq, cautioned that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein might trigger “violent clashes among Iraq’s sects, tribes, and ethnic factions, possibly leading to the country’s fragmentation.” Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Hard Lessons, 14; see also Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, “Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario” (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, February 2003), v–vi, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB182.pdf; Robert D. Kaplan, “A Post-Saddam Scenario,” Atlantic, November 2002.

  “everything” . . . “intensely anti-American”: Chua, World on Fire, Afterword to the Anchor Edition, 290–91.

  “I think protesting”: Essay by Blake Neal, February 3, 2017 (on file with author).

  enormously popular: Hanna Rosin, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?,” Atlantic, December 2009.

  poor and working-class African and Hispanic: Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 111–13; Milmon F. Harrison, Righteous Riches: The Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148–52; Emily Raboteau, “My Search for Creflo Dollar,” Salon, January 6, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/01/06/my_search_for_creflo_dollar); Rosin, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?”

  Three out of four: Bowler, Blessed, 6.

  “In my opinion”: G. Sanchez, e-mail message to author, February 2, 2017.

  Right up until: Michael M. Grynbaum, “As Race Tightened, News Anchors Seemed as Stunned as Anyone,” New York Times, November 9, 2016; James B. Stewart, “Short-Term Reaction to Trump’s Victory Is a Double Surprise to Wall Street Analysts,” Seattle Times, November 12, 2016.

  Trump, in terms of taste: Richard Thompson Ford, “The Ties That Blind,” New York Times, February 10, 2017.

  Trump’s base identifies: J. D. Vance, “How Donald Trump Seduced America’s White Working Class,” Guardian, September 10, 2016; Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam, “Trump’s Appeal: What Psychology Tells Us,” Scientific American, March 1, 2017.

  not the same as: Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016.

  difference between elites: See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 21–22; see also Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Touchstone, 1983).

  chrome bull testicles: Many thanks to Bill Powell for alerting me to these “Truck Nuts,” which are available on Amazon and, “believe it or not, a status symbol” at his high school.

  “supremacist,” “regressive,” “elitist,”: Linda Milazzo, “Newt Gingrich Declares, ‘I Am Not a Citizen of the World!’” Huffington Post, July 10, 2009.

  “[I] have an unyielding”: President Barack Obama, speech at Grand Hall of Cairo University, June 4, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/04/barack-obama-keynote-speech-egypt.

  For the first time: Sandra L. Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman, Projections of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population:
2014 to 2060, U.S. Census Bureau, March 2015, 9.

  “whites have replaced”: Evan Osnos, “The Fearful and the Frustrated,” New Yorker, August 31, 2015 (quoting Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011): 215–18).

  43 percent of black Americans: “On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart,” Pew Research Center, June 27, 2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequality-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart.

  hate crimes have increased 20 percent: Grant Smith and Daniel Trotta, “U.S. Hate Crimes up 20 Percent in 2016 Fueled by Election Campaign-Report,” Reuters, March 13, 2017.

  When groups feel: See Lincoln Quillian, “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (1995): 605–7; Paul M. Sniderman et al., “Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 1 (2004): 47; Nyla R. Branscombe and Daniel L. Wann, “Collective Self-Esteem Consequences of Outgroup Derogation When a Valued Social Identity Is on Trial,” European Journal of Social Psychology 24, no. 6 (1994): 641; Jolanda Jetten et al., “Rebels with a Cause: Group Identification as a Response to Perceived Discrimination from the Mainstream,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27, no. 9 (2001): 1204–13; Michael T. Schmitt and Nyla R. Branscombe, “Meaning and Consequences of Perceived Discrimination in Advantaged and Privileged Social Groups,” European Review of Social Psychology 12 (2002): 165–99.

  “We all want to believe in progress”: Brit Bennett, “I Don’t Know What to Do with Good White People,” Jezebel, December 17, 2014, http://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-what-to-do-with-good-white-people-1671201391.

  Today, any of these acts: See Erich Hatala Matthes, “Cultural Appropriation Without Cultural Essentialism?,” Social Theory and Practice 42, no. 2 (2016): 343–66; Kjerstin Johnson, “Don’t Mess Up When You Dress Up: Cultural Appropriation and Costumes,” Bitch, October 25, 2011.

  “taking back” the country: Sean Illing, “Racists Love Trump—This Is What They Mean by ‘Taking the Country Back’—Yet Another Poll Confirms Racial and Cultural Resentment Is Driving Trump’s Rise,” Salon, April 5, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/04/05/racists_love_trump_this_is_what_they_mean_by_taking_the_country_back_yet_another_poll_confirms_racial_and_cultural_resentment_is_driving_donald_trumps_rise.

  “war on whites”: Chris Massie, “Rep. Brooks: Dems’ ‘War on Whites’ Behind Some Criticism of Sessions,” CNN, January 12, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/11/politics/kfile-mo-brooks-war-on-whites/index.html.

  “My college-age daughter”: Chris Bodenner, “‘If You Want Identity Politics, Identity Politics Is What You Get,’” Atlantic, November 11, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/11/if-you-want-identity-politics-identity-politics-is-what-you-will-get/507437 (quoting “a Trump voter, Alan”).

  Most European and all East Asian: Jaroslav Krejčí and Vitězslav Velímský, “Ethnic and Political Nations in Europe,” in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 211–21; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 148–49; Frank Dikötter, “The Discourse of Race in Twentieth-Century China,” in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, ed. Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel (Leiden, The Netherlands, Brill: 2013), 351, 367; Gi-Wook Shin, “Racist South Korea? Diverse but Not Tolerant of Diversity,” in Kowner and Demel, Race and Racism in Modern East Asia, 369–71; Jean-Pierre Lehmann, “The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan,” in Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, 118, 120.

  world’s first “tweeter-in-chief”: Samuel Burke, “Hugo Chávez Was First Tweeter-in-Chief,” CNN, January 26, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/26/technology/hugo-Chavez-first-twitter-president-venezuela-trump.

  “victory for democracy”: Juan Forero, “Uprising in Venezuela,” New York Times, April 13, 2002; Chua, World on Fire, 144–45.

  Chapter One: American Exceptionalism and the Sources of U.S. Group Blindness Abroad

  “America is God’s Crucible”: Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1908), act 1.

  “Daddy once told”: Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2017), 196.

  minutely knowledgeable: See, e.g., Omar Khalidi, “Ethnic Group Recruitment in the Indian Army: The Contrasting Cases of Sikhs, Muslims, Gurkhas and Others,” Pacific Affairs 74, no. 4 (Winter 2001–2002): 530; David Omissi, “‘Martial Races’: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial India 1858–1939,” War & Society 9, no. 1 (1991): 8–10, 18–19; Kaushik Roy, “The Construction of Regiments in the Indian Army: 1859–1913,” War in History 8, no. 2 (2001): 129, 135, 137–39; Ukana B. Ikpe, “The Patrimonial State and Inter-Ethnic Conflicts in Nigeria,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 4 (2009): 685; Peter Richens, “The Economic Legacies of the ‘Thin White Line’: Indirect Rule and the Comparative Development of Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Economic History 37 (2009): 37–38.

  deliberately pitting groups: David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London: Macmillan Press, 1994), 9–10, 96; Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 23–24.

  some forty thousand British: Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 214.

  practical necessity of: See, e.g., J. C. Myers, “On Her Majesty’s Ideological State Apparatus: Indirect Rule and Empire,” New Political Science 27, no. 2 (2005): 147–60; Richens, “The Economic Legacies of the ‘Thin White Line,’” 33–102.

  constructed its “empire”: See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 284 (most “old” Cold War historians agree that “despite its anti-imperial traditions the United States constructed an empire after 1945,” although they debate “whether this happened intentionally or by inadvertence”); see also Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2–4, 10, 13.

  “You cannot dedicate”: The New York Times Current History: The European War, vol. 3 (New York: New York Times Company, 1917), 441 (italics added).

  Native Americans . . . Mexican Americans: Robert B. Porter, “The Demise of the Ongwehoweh and the Rise of the Native Americans: Redressing the Genocidal Act of Forcing American Citizenship upon Indigenous Peoples,” Harvard Blackletter Law Journal 15 (1999): 123–24; Stephen Steinberg, “How Jewish Quotas Began,” Commentary 52, no. 3 (1971): 67–76; Edwin E. Ferguson, “The California Alien Land Law and the Fourteenth Amendment,” California Law Review 35 (1947): 61–73; Richard Delgado, “The Law of the Noose: A History of Latino Lynching,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 44 (2009): 299–303.

  resegregation of the civil service: Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 79–172; Kathleen L. Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History 44, no. 2 (1959): 158–73; Gordon J. Davis, “What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather,” New York Times, November 24, 2015.

  long line of Yoruba kings: Colin A. Palmer, “From Africa to the Americas: Ethnicity in the Early Black Communities,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995), 224–25.

  Even now, immigrants: Jack David Eller, Culture and Diversity in the United States: So Many Ways to Be American (New York: Routledge, 2015), 57.

  “savages that delight in war”: Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 46.

  566 federally recognized tribes: “Federal and Sta
te Recognized Tribes,” National Conference of State Legislatures, October 2016, accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribal-institute/list-of-federal-and-state-recognized-tribes.aspx.

  “abused, conformist quasi-robots”: Wesley Yang, “Paper Tigers,” New York, May 8, 2011.

  all “Gooks” to us: Nguyen Cao Ky, How We Lost the Vietnam War (New York: First Cooper Square Press, 2002), 137–38.

  “strange mixture of blood”: Louis L. Snyder, The New Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 266.

  extensive race slavery inside its borders: In comparison to the nearly 4 million black slaves in the United States by the time of the Civil War (approximately 12.6 percent of the total population), the slave population in Europe was small. See “Census of 1860 Population-Effect on the Representation of the Free and Slave States,” New York Times, April 5, 1860. It is estimated that in the eighteenth century, the total slave population in England was between 14,000 and 15,000. See James Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery,” Journal of British Studies 27, no. 1 (1988): 47 n. 11. Estimates put the total black population, free or enslaved, in France at between 4,000 and 5,000. Samuel L. Chatman, “‘There Are No Slaves in France’: A Re-Examination of Slave Laws in Eighteenth Century France,” Journal of Negro History 85 no. 3 (2000): 144. Similarly, the black population in The Netherlands at that time was just a few thousand with several hundred more scattered throughout Russia, Scandinavia, and Germany. Allison Blakeley, “Problems in Studying the Role of Blacks in Europe,” American Historical Association, May 1997, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-1997/problems-in-studying-the-role-of-blacks-in-europe. Europe’s largest population of black slaves was in the Iberian Peninsula, with as many as 150,000 in the sixteenth century. Ibid. By the eighteenth century, however, that number diminished significantly; in the Spanish city of Cádiz, for example, the once sizable population of African slaves had decreased nearly to zero by the end of the eighteenth century. William D. Phillips, Jr., Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 26. Canada’s slave population was also small compared to that of the U.S.; it is estimated that there were no more than 4,200 slaves in total between 1671 and 1834, with only a third of those black and the rest aboriginal people. Marcel Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, trans. George Tombs (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2013), 254–71.