“Racists, Or Just Trolls?”
By You may remember Amy Chua from such arguments as “you should make the life of your children miserable so they can attain certain markers of status that will make you look good.” Well, she’s back with a new book with her husband, which provides us the latest round of “ethnic group x drives like this and ethnic group y drives like this, which gives us a grand unified theory of everything.” The reviews are in! Richard Kim:
Do you feel triggered yet? Because you should. Chua and Rubenfeld’s book is many things: pop psychology, ersatz self-help manual, shallow cultural history, a Who’s Who of rich and famous people without a WASPy last name. But first and foremost, it is an epic feat of trolling. In 225 dazzlingly glib pages, Chua and Rubenfeld traffic in broad stereotypes, hijack social science, sow worry, revel in conflict and derail the conversation—all with the gleeful “sorry not sorry” mania of a Cheetos and Dr Pepper–fueled Reddit poster.
[…]
Everything in The Triple Package is adduced to support racialized, ethnic and religious notions of “culture,” a concept the authors summarily refuse to define. Critics will compare their treatise to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s notorious The Bell Curve, but it’s worth noting that they serve two very different purposes. Herrnstein and Murray’s book, written in the mid-’90s, invoked the specter of American decline to naturalize the unequal distribution of resources and opportunity among racial groups. For Chua and Rubenfeld, however, racial and ethnic hierarchies aren’t the end goal; they’re merely expedient vectors of Triple Package culture, and the authors maintain a blithe nonchalance about the validity of chauvinist claims. It doesn’t matter whether Jews really are chosen by the one God, or whether Indian-American Brahmans are truly born to rule; what matters is that the people within those groups believe it to be so. In one particularly galling twist, Chua and Rubenfeld argue that the civil rights movement is partly responsible for holding African-Americans down, because by ushering in the liberal mantra of racial equality, it denied them the opportunity to espouse racial superiority.
Serious sociologists like Harvard’s William Julius Wilson and Yale’s Elijah Anderson believe that culture plays a role in economic success, but that history, economic forces, and first-wave wealth explain far more than culture. Put differently, history and structure drive the bus, and culture might be a passenger along for the ride. But the cultural arguments in the book aren’t serious, more entertaining anecdote and “status anxiety as social theory” than well-supported science.
Of course The Triple Package isn’t really serious scholarship, notwithstanding the authors’ impressive credentials. As yet another intentionally provocative story for a trade press playing to the crowd, the Triple Package narrative works well. But as a rigorous substantive claim about persistent inequality among racial, ethnic, and religious groups, The Triple Package’s argument doesn’t begin to make the grade.
I can understand Nick Kristof’s complaints about excessively obscure and difficult academic writing to a point, but oversimplifying to try to sell books to a general audience is not without its perils either.