The Triple Package by Jed Rubenfeld, Amy Chua Read Free Book Online Page B

middle of their university or postgraduate careers. Thus the big payoffs from Nigerian educational attainment are probably still to come. But a larger factor may well be discrimination. African immigrants frequently testify to experiences of racial discrimination, and data repeatedly show that high-skilled immigrants from Africaend up in unskilled jobs far more than any other immigrants (except those from Latin America) and other Americans overall.
    For all these reasons, however, Nigerian American success—including their extraordinary performance relative to the overall black population—is of special importance to this book. Conservatives like Dinesh D’Souza have argued that African Americans’ poverty is the result not of discrimination, but of a “dysfunctional” culture that includes a “conspiratorial paranoia about racism” and a “celebration of the criminal and the outlaw as authentically black.” Some liberals assert, on the contrary, that African American poverty is entirely theproduct of racism, whether overt, covert, or “structural.” Both sides of this argument are mistaken.
    As we’ll discuss later, the success of Nigerian Americans andcertain other black immigrants—who face many of the same institutional obstacles and prejudices as African Americans—
is
significantly due to cultural forces. While many factors contribute to the lower overall socioeconomic status of African Americans, the Triple Package is an important part of the story behind black immigrant success. The lesson to take, however, is not that native-born American blacks have only themselves to blame for their economic position. The lesson is that the United States did everything it could for centuries to grind the Triple Package out of African American culture—and is still doing so today.
    —
    I N J UNE 2012, the Pew Research Center released a report called
The Rise of
Asian American
s
, describing Asians as “thehighest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”
    We’ll use “Asian American” the same way the Census Bureau (as well as Pew) does, covering all U.S. residents “having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.” But for our purposes, “Asian American” isn’t a very useful classification. It embraces vastly disparate groups with entirely different cultures, including two of the most successful groups in the nation (Indian and Chinese Americans) andseveral of the poorest (such as Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodian Americans). *
    Among the most successful Asian American groups, onewell-known phenomenon is the breathtaking accomplishment of their youth, who top list after list of prestigious awards and competitions. For example, over the last five years,twenty-three of the fifty top prizewinners of the Intel Science Talent search—a nationwide high school competition that George H. W. Bush called the “Super Bowl of science”—were Asian Americans, overwhelmingly of Indian, Chinese, and to a lesser extent Korean heritage.
    The résumés of these Intel winners are terrifying to even your run-of-the-mill Tiger Mom. Take Amy Chyao of Richardson, Texas, a 2012 finalist. By attaching a nitric oxide donor to titanium dioxide nanotubes, Amy “synthesized a nanoparticle,” as the
New
York Times
reported, which “essentially is a remotely triggered bomb that attacks cancer cells,” offering a potential noninvasive alternative to chemotherapy for deep tumors. The pretty seventeen-year-old is the co-author of two articles in peer-reviewed journals, has perfect ACT scores, was first in her high school class of 1,473, is an accomplished cellist, and founded a nonprofit organization to teach immigrant children spelling. Dozens of similar bios can be found among the Intel winners: for example, the saxophone-playing Chinese American teen who developed “a treatment for phenylketonuria” while serving as editor-in-chief of