NYTimes | A
SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups,
much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive
and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and
national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans
overall.
Indian-Americans
earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in
median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and
Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons
have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many
of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some
groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with
a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good
policy.
Jewish
success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based.
Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult
population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over
two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a
third of American Nobel laureates.
The
most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere
artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their
children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and
education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a
small part of the picture.
Today’s
wealthy Mormon businessmen often started from humble origins. Although
India and China send the most immigrants to the United States through
employment-based channels, almost half of all Indian immigrants and over
half of Chinese immigrants do not enter the country under those
criteria. Many are poor and poorly educated. Comprehensive data
published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the
children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced
exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic
or educational background.
Take
New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx
Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year,
Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized
entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620
Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of
restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
Merely
stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as
measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a
firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is
that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
There
are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some
white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African
countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s
higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians.
Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the
United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at
Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of
Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared
with only about 11 percent of whites.
Cuban-Americans
in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative
affluence. By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents
had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as
likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three
Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
Meanwhile,
some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for
example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some
predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
MOST
fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP
elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation
Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any
census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate
after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT
scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over
whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that
third-generation Asian-American students performed no better
academically than white students.
The
fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of
“model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological
differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
It
turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful
groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel
success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in
their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite —
insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough.
The third is impulse control.
