New Book by ‘Tiger Mom’ Dabbles in Cultural Eugenics or Something
Are you ready to have your mind boggled so hard that you might vomit? Great. Author Amy Chua, also known as “Tiger Mom,” “Dubious Yale Law Professor,” and “Psycho Lady Author Who Ties Her Children to Benches as Discipline,” has widened her scope of racial superiority trolling with a new, utterly confusing book that claims that only eight cultural groups have what it takes to succeed in America. The not-so-hidden subtext of her book is that everyone else can suck it — “it” being “my wildly successful, Ivy-League attending, culturally superior ladyboner.”
First and foremost — because we know you’re so anxious about whether you’re a culturally-predestined loser or not — what are the best cultures? Chua’s book The Triple Package singles out the following:
Jews Indian Chinese Iranians Lebanese-Americans Nigerians Cuban exiles Mormons
The group least likely to succeed in America: Poor white people, because, as Chua says with utter seriousness, “it’s far more socially acceptable today to insult and look down on ‘white trash’ than the poor of any other racial group.” We should take her word for it. Chua is Chinese and her co-author/husband, Jed Rubenfeld, is Jewish. By this virtue alone, they can see things from their lofty racial perch that we mongrels, ignorantly wallowing in ignorant ignorance down here, do not.
(Sidenote: to our Chinese-American and Jewish readers, we don’t blame you for Amy Chua and/or Jed Rubenfeld, and absolve you of all responsibility for anything these raving narcissists bellow. XOXO, Mediaite.)
And why these groups? What’s wrong with, say, the Irish? A baffled New York Post review attempted to summarize Chua’s argument: these groups “possess, in the authors’ estimation, three qualities that they’ve identified as guarantors of wealth and power: superiority, insecurity and impulse control.” These qualities, collectively known as the “Triple Package,” are only abundant in those eight cultural groups because they’re all immigrant cultures. Except for the Jews and Mormons — but they’re like immigrants, see, because according to the book, they all:
1. believe they are culturally superior to everyone else 2. simultaneously feel like outsiders/potential failures 3. are able to, in Chua’s words “resist temptation…to give up in the face of hardship,” which is a thing that people who have bought into “mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles” cannot do. (By the way, that latter group includes the white people who don’t belong in the list of Special Cultures. We’re not sure why white people who aren’t Jews or Mormons are now all mainstream liberals. This is confusing.)
The Post’s final word: this book is terrible, and that Amy Chua sucks at both basic research (collecting data, making coherent arguments, and not-pandering) and being a rabble-rouser. “[The book is] a series of shock-arguments wrapped in self-help tropes,” they rule, “and it’s meant to do what racist arguments do: scare people.”
That, and give us concussions. Let us all go lie down in dark rooms and take some ibuprofen.
(Sidenote 1: We love how, unlike her last book Battle Cry of the Tiger Mom, Chua singles out Chinese people as The Best Asians in America, ignoring all the other Asian immigrant groups in the US, despite the fact that they also possess the Triple Package. Sorry, Vietnamese people; screw you, Koreans; and go eff yourself, Thai folk — apparently we’re all inferior to Amy Chua and her Chinese Master Race.)
[NYP]
Image via AmyChua.com
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
