The Triple Package (9 page)

Moreover, the theory of the Triple Package allows an additional observation, which is much more difficult to deal with—or even to acknowledge.

At least since
Brown v. Board of Education
and the civil rights acts of the 1960s, America’s official racial mantra has been equality. You can criticize America’s ideal of equality as unfulfilled—some might even call it hypocritical—but its premises are clear and noble. All individuals are equal; every race is equal; every group is just as good as every other.

But the dirty secret is that the groups enjoying disproportionate success in America do not tell themselves, “We’re as good as other people.” They tell themselves they’re better.

In this paradoxical sense, equality isn’t fair to African Americans. Superiority is the one narrative that America has relentlessly denied to or ground out of its black population, not only in the old era of slavery and Jim Crow, but equally in the new era of equality, when everyone must kowtow to the idea that there’s no difference between different racial groups. “We’re a superior people,” is the one belief America has consistently and deliberately tried to deny blacks, from the day the first African captives were bought by American settlers, to the days of affirmative action, white guilt, and mass incarceration.

It’s one thing for a group with a longstanding superiority complex to pledge allegiance to the idea of universal equality. After all, a group’s silent belief in its own superiority isn’t fundamentally altered by this declaration; indeed, as they proclaim the equality of all mankind, members of such a group can pride themselves on their generosity and open-mindedness (showing just how superior they really are). It’s quite another thing for a group with a long history of
inferiority narratives behind it to be asked to pledge allegiance to the same ideal.

Not coincidentally, most of America’s great black colleges and universities—Morehouse, Spelman, Howard, and many others—were founded with the mission of
fostering the kind of collective pride that other groups in the United States turn into superiority narratives. There’s a huge difference in black students’ academic experience when the honors students, student body president, and math and science prizewinners are all African American; placing a special curricular emphasis on the accomplishments of African Americans and the African diaspora, as these colleges usually do, can make a big difference too. Studies strongly suggest that the sense of group pride instilled in students at historically black colleges and universities has contributed to their achieving
better academic and economic outcomes. It’s hardly a coincidence that so many of America’s most influential black figures—including Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Jesse Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison—
attended historically black colleges.

In the 1960s, the Black Power, “Black Is Beautiful,” Black Panther, Nation of Islam, and Afrocentrism movements sought to
reclaim black history and rewrite racial narratives, often turning the tables on white superiority, even claiming the mantle of divine chosenness.
Malcolm X, when still a follower of the Nation of Islam, urged blacks to believe

not only that we’re as good as the White man, but better than the White man. . . . That’s not saying anything . . . just to be equal with him. Who is he to be equal with? You look at his skin. You can’t compare your skin with his skin. Why, your skin looks like gold beside his skin.

Louis Farrakhan would say in 1985, “I declare to the world that the people of God are not those who call themselves Jews, but the people of God who are chosen at this critical time in history is you, the black people of America.”

Martin Luther King was surely right when he said that “black supremacy,” which he saw in the teachings of the Nation of Islam, would be just “as dangerous as white supremacy.” But the fact of the matter is that America’s most successful groups are cashing in on superiority stories they still believe in and still pass down to their children. This is an advantage that was denied to African Americans—and continues to be denied to them today.

—

C
AN THE EFFECT
of a superiority complex be tested empirically? It has been, and the results dramatically confirm that such complexes lift achievement.

Beginning with the
pioneering “stereotype threat” studies conducted by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, hundreds of controlled experiments have now shown that people’s performance on all kinds of measures is dramatically affected by their belief that they’re doing something their group is stereotypically good or bad at. Merely reminding people of a negative group stereotype—sometimes even just by requiring them to
identify their race or gender on a questionnaire before a test—can worsen their performance.

Thus
black students score lower on standardized test questions when their test instructions remind them about stereotypes concerning differential racial performance on such tests.
White male Stanford students specially selected for high math ability scored worse on a difficult math test when told that the researchers were trying to understand “the phenomenal math achievement of Asians.”
Women chess players lost more online games when reminded that men
dominate chess rankings—provided they believed they were playing a man (the effect disappeared when they were falsely told their opponent was another woman).

Researchers have also established the opposite effect: stereotype boost. For example, women performed better at
visual rotation when told that the task tested a “perspective-taking” skill that women were expected to perform well on (but worse when told that the task was “spatial” and that women were not expected to excel). In a laboratory-controlled
miniature golf experiment—we’re not making this up—whites did better when the putting test was described as measuring “sports intelligence” than when told that it measured “natural athletic ability.”
Asian undergraduates scored significantly better on math questions when their instructions stated that “these types of tests measure individuals’ true intellectual ability, which historically have shown differences based on ethnic heritage.” Crucially, this effect held only for those Asian students who “strongly identified” with their ethnic heritage; for those who didn’t, the instruction made little or no difference.

Outside the laboratory, in-depth studies of Asian and Hispanic American high schoolers in Southern California found that Asian students were profiting from a stereotype lift. In a study including Vietnamese as well as Chinese American students, sociologists Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee found that, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, positive stereotypes and ingrained expectations about superior Asian academic achievement—both internal to the culture of these groups and widespread in society at large—significantly contributed to the exceptional academic outcomes of the children of Asian American immigrants.

Since Steele and Aronson published their early findings in 1995, stereotype threat and boost have been among the most widely studied phenomena in social psychology. Perhaps the most astonishing
finding in these studies is the susceptibility of individuals to even a single, one-sentence, subtle suggestion of a group stereotype. Imagine, then, the boost you might derive if belief in your group’s superiority were part of the culture you grew up in, instilled by your parents, grandparents, and community from the day you were born.

—

T
HE CULTURAL BURDEN BORNE
by African Americans—along with their susceptibility to stereotype threat—is thrown into sharp relief by the fact that black immigrants are often free of it, at least when they first arrive. In her gripping memoir
The House at Sugar Beach
, the
New York Times
journalist Helene Cooper, a Liberian American, describes the choice made by her ancestors, free American-born blacks, to leave the United States for Liberia—a choice she sees as having armed her, by sheer fortuity of birthplace, with a worldview different from that of many American blacks:

Because of that choice, I would not grow up, 150 years later, as an American black girl, weighed down by racial stereotypes about welfare queens. . . . Instead, [they] handed down to me a one-in-a-million lottery ticket: birth into what passed for the landed gentry upper class of Africa’s first independent country, Liberia. None of that American post–civil war/civil rights movement baggage to bog me down with any inferiority complex about whether I was as good as white people. No European garbage to have me wondering whether some British colonial master was somehow better than me. Who needs to struggle for equality? Let everybody else try to be equal to me.

Culturally and psychologically, “let everyone else try to be equal to me” is worlds apart from “I’m just as good as other people.” It’s the
expression of a superiority complex, and in a society where negative stereotypes are widespread, the confidence it confers on a minority group can be extremely valuable.

This is certainly true of Nigerian Americans. Among West Africans, the
stereotype of Nigerians as “arrogant” is common. But the overwhelming majority of Nigerian Americans are not merely Nigerian. They are
Igbo or Yoruba, two peoples renowned—and often resented—throughout Western Africa for being disproportionately successful and ethnocentric. The Yoruba boast
an illustrious royal lineage and a once great empire. Upstarts by comparison, the entrepreneurial
Igbo are often called the “Jews of West Africa.” Chinua Achebe, the late Igbo-Nigerian author and winner of the Man Booker Prize, warned of
the “dangers of hubris,” “overweening pride,” and “showiness” among the Igbo—and of other Nigerians’ “resentment” against them.

Because of these superiority narratives, the theory of the Triple Package would predict that black immigrants should be able to fend off negative stereotypes better than African Americans can. Again, empirical evidence confirms this result. In a
recent study of more than 1,800 students at twenty-eight American selective colleges, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors, first- and second-generation black immigrant students did not suffer the same stereotype-threat effects that American black students did. And as many similar studies have shown,
the more strongly black immigrant students identify with their specific ethnic origins, the better they perform.

Newcomers from Africa and the West Indies frequently point to
what they perceive as defeatism among African Americans, identifying this mind-set as an obstacle to black success. In the words of one business-school graduate, born in the United States to two Nigerian parents:

Perception is very important, and I think that is what holds African-Americans back. If you start thinking about or becoming absorbed in the mentality that the whole system is against us, then you cannot succeed. . . .
Nigerians do not have this. I feel that Nigerians coming from Nigeria feel they are capable of anything. . . . [T]hey don’t feel they can’t do chemistry or engineering or anything because they are Black.

Superiority complexes can be invidious, but in a society rife with prejudice they can also provide what sociologists have described as “
an ethnic armor” enabling some minorities “to cope psychologically, even in the face of discrimination and exclusion.”

Helene Cooper had this kind of armor. She experienced numerous racist episodes after arriving in South Carolina as a fourteen-year-old. What made her proof against them, as she tells her story, was the internalized sense of superiority she brought with her from Liberia, where her family belonged to the elite “
Congo people,” descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the country, as distinct from the “Country people,” a derogatory term for “native” Liberians. On top of that, her family were “
Honorables,” an even higher distinction. “You could have a Ph.D. from Harvard but if you were a Country man . . . you were still outranked in Liberian society by an Honorable with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee.” Thus when Cooper’s freshman roommate, “
a white girl from Seagrove, North Carolina, who didn’t want to room with a black girl,” transferred out of their room, Cooper “called my father and told him, and we both laughed about it on the phone. I felt no outrage. . . . It was completely incomprehensible to me that she could be that much of an idiot.”

The way Cooper warded off the blows of American racism—
fending off one brand of ethnocentrism with another—is surprisingly common among America’s disproportionately successful groups. Especially among minorities, this strategy tends to function much more as a defensive shield of self-protection than as a weapon of contempt against others.

—

T
O CONCLUDE,
every one of America’s disproportionately successful groups has a deeply ingrained superiority complex, whether rooted in theology, history, or imported social hierarchies that most Americans know nothing about. If a disproportionately successful group could be found in the United States
without
a superiority complex, that would be a counterexample, undercutting the Triple Package thesis.

But superiority complexes are hard to maintain. As one generation passes to the next, group identity and ethnic pride come under attack. All the forces of assimilation work against it, including the homogenizing pull of American culture. For racial minorities, there will be the additional assaults of prejudice and discrimination. America’s ideals of equality will come into play as well, eroding superiority claims. Second- and third-generation Americans may begin (perhaps correctly) to see their parents’ superiority complex as bigoted or racist and reject it for that reason. As nature abhors a vacuum, so America abhors a superiority complex—except its own. Yet disproportionate success in the United States comes to groups who, in the face of these pressures, find a way to maintain belief in their own superiority.

Superiority alone, however, is merely complacent. The titled nobility of Victorian England had plenty of superiority but were not famously hardworking; even when in financial straits, they would have found employment or entrepreneurship contemptible. For this
reason, important as they are, the stereotype boost experiments capture only a piece of the Triple Package dynamic. Only when superiority comes together with the other elements of the Triple Package does it generate drive, grit, and systematic disproportionate group success.