An Unnecessary Divide

The self-proclaimed ‘Tiger Mom,’ Amy Chua, came into collective consciousness in 2011 when the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from her book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother under the headline: “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Her latest book, The Triple Threat: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, written with her husband Jed Rubenfeld, has caught national attention once again as it attempts to define who is successful and why.

Defining ‘success’ can be difficult, to say the least. But it seems that Chua’s newest book, as well as her first one, unconsciously (or consciously?) drives an unnecessary feeling of distance and opposition among communities, further strengthening the perception of ‘difference’ in various cultural groups. Since matters surrounding taste and class were assigned to be discussed this week, I thought I’d share this story from NPR’s Code Switch: “’Tiger Mother’Author Spells Out 3 Traits That Drive Success In The U.S.”

The interview features the couple speaking on behalf of their provocative new book, which attempts to explain why not just Asians (like Chua) and also seven other groups—including Jews (like Rubenfeld), Mormons, Indians, Iranians, Nigerians, Lebanese, Cubans—are superior when it comes to succeeding in America. In the book, Chua and Rubenfeld claim that certain cultural groups thrive because they all possess three specific traits: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control—validating the perception that certain minority groups are culturally ‘better.’

On its own, the book conflates race with culture, which is problematic in itself. It’s an issue that has, over the years, become insidiously commonplace as new strains of ethnic, racial, and cultural reductivism has crept in and out of American public discourse. It has, unfortunately, become relatively ‘normal’ for different groups (and individuals such as Chua and Rubenfeld) to tout cultural superiority and to see themselves as ‘model minorities.’ But when does cultural pride cross the line into racism?

This is what bothered me about Chua and Rubenfeld’s book. Who’s to say, exactly, what entails “success?” Not them, nor anyone else for that matter. Perceptions of taste, class, success, etc. are, of course, a ‘manifested preference,’ as Pierre Bourdieu writes in “The Aesthetic Sense As The Sense of Distinction”—“one manifestation of the system of dispositions produced by the social conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence when they take the paradoxical form of the greatest freedom conceivable, at a given moment, with respect to the constraints of economic necessity.” Hence, taste can be seen as “the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” and, according to Bourdieu, “is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes.” (p. 205). 

In many ways, I feel that Chua and Rubenfeld’s book further complicates the racial (and economic) disparity that continues to exist in this country—that ‘barrier between the classes’ that Bourdieu speaks of. Typically, what makes people so uncomfortable with disparity isn’t so much that it exists, but how and why it does. The Triple Threat seems to attribute the how and the why to none other than culture. The couple rattles off in the book about the socioeconomic successes of specific cultural groups, providing evidence here and there about how “certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.” However, in their attempt to “decry stereotyping,” the book, as a whole, only seems to reinforce (and reproduce) cultural stereotypes.

America has no doubt taken great pains throughout history to shed one of its most ‘distasteful’ ignorances: the belief that human beings of different skin tones, belief systems, and cultural backgrounds have nothing in common with one another. Our greatest hope is to one day create a nation where all varieties of people can identify themselves with each other without the presence of strong social “barriers.” Over the years, there’s obviously been an increased diversity in the American distribution of power as well as in the voices that carry the American conversation-- but it is still an ongoing tug of war that pits more diverse and tolerant individuals against those who are unwilling to give up on the status quo.

Bourdieu claims that matters of taste can both unite and separate, uniting “all those who are the product of similar conditions while distinguishing them from all others” (p. 205). In more ways than one, books like Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom and The Triple Package seem only to spread thoughts that can negatively influence social relations and dynamics between people-- creating, in the end, even more disparity than there was before. For a book written supposedly by ‘intellectuals’ (both authors are influential Yale law professors), it, in my mind, succeeds far too much in antagonizing and dividing communities, instead of attempting to do the complete opposite: uniting them.