At next Salisbury Forum: Why minorities succeed

SALISBURY — They are a smart, successful married couple. They are both Harvard Law graduates, both popular Yale Law professors and both bestselling authors: He has written two well-received mysteries, she is the author of the controversial “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” Now Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld will speak at a Salisbury Forum on Friday, Nov. 14.

Recently Chua and Rubenfeld, either oblivious to the storm of criticism — and heaps of praise, too — that greeted “Tiger Mother” or willing to face more of the same, collaborated on “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.” 

In what is either a brave slap at accepted political correctness or a brilliant marketing ploy playing into America’s paranoia about immigration and declining national fortunes, Chua and Rubenfeld look at certain “cultural groups” and identify — to the authors’ satisfaction, at least — why they have succeeded in the U.S. disproportionately to their numbers. Mormons, Asians, Cubans, Nigerians, Jews, Indians, Lebanese and Iranians are studied as groups to find commonalities of success. 

Chua and Rubenfeld conclude that successful immigrant groups share a feeling of inferiority (being outsiders) coupled with a sense of superiority (the chosen people) and a strong ability to control impulses. As successive generations of these groups become successful, however, these traits can be, and often are, less important or lost. “America is the great wrecker of impulse control,” they write. 

Chua and Rubenfeld seem particularly suited to attack this subject. Chua is the child of Chinese-American academics, Rubenfeld the son of nonobserving Jewish parents. Both did brilliantly as undergraduates — he at Princeton, she at Harvard — and at Harvard Law, where they met and were both executive editors of the law review. When they married 26 years ago, Chua insisted that their children learn Mandarin — interesting, since she only spoke her family’s Hokkien dialect — and that they be raised Jewish. (Both their daughters were bat mitzvahed.)

“Triple Package” is a fascinating book filled with facts and statistics. Chua and Rubenfeld ran lots of numbers, collected huge amounts of data, hired research assistants representing many backgrounds. They qualified their thesis in various ways and avoided the Malcolm Gladwell  simple sociology approach. Yet this is a subject that rouses accusations of racism, of ethnic superiority and inferiority. It’s a subject ripe for questioning, dialogue and understanding.

The Salisbury Forum will present Chua and Rubenfeld on Friday, Nov. 14, at 7:30 p.m., at the Salisbury Congregational Church on Main Street, opposite Town Hall. A selection of their books will be for sale after the program, and they will sign copies.