The Triple Package (34 page)

I can’t help them [African Americans] because they’re so wrapped up in racism, and they act it out so often, they interpret it as such so often that sometimes they are not even approachable. If they’re going to teach anything and it’s not black, black, all black, they are not satisfied, you know. . . . Sometimes I feel sorry for them, but you find that you just can’t change their attitude because they just tell you that you don’t understand.

Waters,
Black Identities
,
pp. 171–2.

“an ethnic armor”
:
Min Zhou, “The Ethnic System of Supplementary Education: Nonprofit and For-Profit Institutions in Los Angeles’ Chinese Immigrant Community,” in Marybeth Shinn and Hirokazu Yoshikawa, eds.,
Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 232.

“Congo people”
:
Cooper,
The House on Sugar Beach
, p. 6.

“Honorables”
:
Ibid., p. 11.

“a white girl from Seagrove”
:
Helene Cooper, “Author Interview,” http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Helene-Cooper/18871279/interviews/91.

CHAPTER 4: INSECURITY

“Old World”
 . . . “secret restlessness”:
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,
trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969) vol. 2, part II, chap. 13, pp. 535–8.

“All are constantly bent”
:
Ibid., vol. 2, part III, chap. 19, p. 627.

“never stop thinking”
 . . . “cloud”:
Ibid., vol. 2, part II, chap. 13, pp. 536, 538.

“longing to rise”
:
Ibid., vol. 2, part III, chap. 19, p. 627.

“in the midst of their prosperity”
:
Ibid., vol. 2, part II, chap. 13, p. 535.

“Hell hath no fury”
:
What William Congreve actually has his character Zara say in
The Mourning Bride
is “Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d/Nor hell a fury like a woman scorn’d” (Act III, scene VIII). See “The Mourning Bride: A Tragedy,” in John Bell,
Bell’s British Theatre Consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays
(London: George Cawthorn, British Library, 1797), vol. 19, p. 63.

Everything can be borne but contempt
:
Arthur O. Lovejoy,
Reflections on Human Nature
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), p. 181 (quoting Voltaire’s
Traité de métaphysique
) (“To be an object of contempt to those with whom one lives is a thing that none ever has been, or ever will be, able to endure”).

about a third
:
Thomas D. Boswell and James R. Curtis,
The Cuban-American Experience: Culture, Images, and Perspectives
(Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), p. 46.

forced to take any work
:
María Cristina García,
Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p. 20; Miguel Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
(Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 36.

“less-advertised corollary”
:
Tad Friend,
Cheerful
Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp
Splendor
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), p. 153; see also E. Digby Baltzell, “The Protestant Establishment Revisited,”
The
American Scholar
45, no. 4 (1976), pp. 499, 505 (noting that third-generation WASPS went to “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, where they joined the best clubs and graduated usually . . . with ‘gentleman Cs’”), pp. 506, 512.

A culture that “once valued education”
:
Peter Sayles, “Report from Newport RI: American WASPs—Dispossessed, Degenerate . . . Or Both?” VDARE.com, Jan. 20, 2013; see also Jerome Karabel,
The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission
and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), pp. 115, 131.

“got lazy”
:
Robert Frank, “That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP,”
Wall Street Journal
, May 15, 2010; see also David Brooks, “Why Our Elites Stink,”
New York Times
, July 12, 2012.

“the scum of the Earth”
:
Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
,
pp. 46–7.

“an ideological quest”
:
Ibid.

contempt of discrimination
:
García,
Havana USA
, pp. 18–20, 40; Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
,
p. 37; Guillermo J. Grenier and Lisandro Pérez,
The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States
(Boston: Pearson Education, 2003), p. 52.

“When we first arrived in Miami”
:
Interview with José Pico, director and president, JPL Investments Corp., in Miami, Fla. (conducted by Eileen Zelek on Jan. 6, 2012) (on file with authors); see also Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
, p. 37.

plummet in status
:
Susan Eva Eckstein,
The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland
(New Haven, CT, and London: Routledge, 2009), p. 83; David Rieff,
The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 48; Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
, pp. 34–6.

“my father would run into people who knew him”
:
Telephone interview with Professor Domitila Fox, Florida International University (conducted by Eileen Zelek on Mar. 17, 2012) (on file with authors); see also García,
Havana USA
, pp. 18–20.

“the one dependable emotional motive”
:
Robert C. Solomon, “Nietzsche and the Emotions,” in Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer, eds.,
Nietzsche and Depth Psychology
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 127, 142.

Ancient Persia is seen, if at all, through a Greek lens
:
Much of this paragraph is taken from Amy Chua,
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 4, 6–7; see also Pierre Briant,
From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire
, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), pp. 5–7; Hooman Majd,
The Ayatollah Begs to Dffer: The Paradox of Modern Iran
(New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 163.

“I just can’t get over the humiliation”
:
“Xerxes and the Persian Army: What They Really Looked Like,” A Persian’s Perspective, Mar. 18, 2007, http://persianperspective.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/xerxes-and-the-persian-army-what-they-really-looked-like.

Iran
is
Persia
:
Kenneth M. Pollack,
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America
(New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 3, 30–1.

“a superpower like nothing the world had ever seen”
:
Pollack,
The Persian Puzzle
, p. 3; see Chua,
Day of Empire
, p. 4.

larger even than Rome’s
 . . . 42 million people:
see Chua,
Day of Empire
, p. 4.

Persian “superiority complex”
:
See, e.g., Majd,
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
, p. 164; Robert Graham,
Iran: The Illusion of Power
(London: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), p. 192.

“All Iranians”
:
see Majd,
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
, p. 163.

“a widely remarked sense of superiority”
:
Pollack,
The Persian Puzzle
, p. 3; see also Graham,
Iran
, pp. 190–2 (describing Iran’s “sense of superiority” and sense of “uniqueness,” which “derives from a somewhat romanticised view of their history, but centres round the suppleness with which they have been able to survive different waves of conquest and absorb cultural influences without having their own identity submerged”); Kathryn Babayan,
Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 492–3 (noting how twentieth-century nationalist movements in Iran “underscored Persian superiority”).

Alexander the Great
:
Chua,
Day of Empire
, p. 27.

“such a brute”
:
Majd,
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
, p. 164; see also ibid., p. 12 (mentioning the author’s grandfather, “who also happened to be an Ayatollah”); Chua,
Day of Empire
, pp. 24–6.

“savage bedouins”
 . . . “camel’s milk and lizards”:
Joya Blondel Saad,
The Image of Arabs in Modern Persian Literature
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), pp. 6–7.

“constantly fight among themselves”
:
Ibid., p. 8 (quoting from a classic eleventh-century work by Nâser Khosrow).

most famous modern author, Sâdeq Hedâyat
:
Ibid., p. 29.

“locusts and plague”
 . . . “black, with brutish eyes”:
Ibid., p. 37 (quoting Sâdeq Hedâyat).

“equated Arab domination of Iran”
:
Janet Afary,
The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 25.

“Iranians don’t like being called Arabs”
:
Shadi Akhavan, “Close Enough” (op-ed), Iranian.com, Aug. 25, 2003, http://iranian.com/Opinion/2003/August/Close/index.html.

“tremendous sense of insecurity”
:
Graham,
Iran
, p. 194; see also Graham E. Fuller,
The “Center of the Universe”: The Geopolitics of Iran
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), p. 20.

“with its immediate neighbours”
:
Graham,
Iran
, p. 192.

“national pursuit of empowerment”
:
Abbas Amanat, “The Persian Complex,”
New York Times
, May 25, 2006.

insecurity, too, was part of the cultural inheritance
:
Nima Tasuji, “Reconstructing a New Identity,” in Tara Wilcox-Ghanoonparvar, ed.,
Hyphenated Identities: Second-Generation Iranian-Americans Speak
(Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2007), p. 7.

Status loss, anxiety, resentment, and even trauma
:
Mohsen M. Mobasher,
Iranians in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), p. 8.

status collapse
:
See ibid., p. 8; Tara Bahrampour, “Persia on the Pacific,”
The New Yorker
, Nov. 10, 2003.

House of Sand and Fog
 . . .
Crash
:
See Andre Dubus III,
House of Sand and Fog
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999); Bahrampour, “Persia on the Pacific”; Carol Gerster, “CRASH: A Crash Course on Current Race/Ethnicity Issues,”
The Journal of Media Literacy
55, nos. 1 and 2.

Iranian flags were burned in public, and demonstrators carried signs
:
See, e.g., Mobasher,
Iranians in Texas
, p. 34.

fled to the United States precisely to escape
:
Mitra K. Shavarini,
Educating Immigrants: Experiences of Second-Generation Iranians
(New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004), pp. 38–41.

“God, please don’t let them be Muslim or Iranian”
:
Shadi Akhavan, “Take It from a Good Girl: Fight Back!,”
The Iranian
, Dec. 27, 2002, http://iranian.com/Features/2002/December/Tough/index.html.

“stigma to be hidden
 . . . insecurity and even feelings of self-hatred”:
Tasuji, “Reconstructing a New Identity,” p. 6; see also Shavarini,
Educating Immigrants,
pp. 7, 113–4; Maryam Daha, “Contextual Factors Contributing to Ethnic Identity Development of Second-Generation Iranian American Adolescents,”
Journal of Adolescent Research
26, no. 5 (2011), pp. 543, 554, 563; Mohsen Mobasher, “Cultural Trauma and Ethnic Identity Formation Among Iranian Immigrants in the United States,”
American Behavioral Scientist
50 (2006), pp. 100, 108.

branded part of the “axis of evil”
:
Mobasher,
Iranians in Texas
, pp. 45–7.

Some Iranian parents
:
Shavarini,
Educating Immigrants
, p. 5; Mobasher, “Cultural Trauma and Ethnic Identity Formation Among Iranian Immigrants in the United States,” pp. 103, 113.

self-parodying Internet video
:
“Iranian Census 2010 PSA with Maz Jobrani,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgoLjFJ0rVg.

“stigmatized and humiliated”
:
Mobasher,
Iranians in Texas
, p. 8.

survey of second-generation Iranian Americans
:
Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 543, 547, 552–4.

intense need to distinguish themselves
:
Shavarini,
Educating Immigrants,
p. 6.

status-conscious
:
See, e.g., Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 560–1; Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Daniel Douglas, “Success(ion): Second-Generation Iranian Americans,”
Iranian Studies
44, no. 1 (2011), pp. 5, 7.

“every Mercedes you see belongs to an Iranian person”
:
Shavarini,
Educating Immigrants
, p. 150; see also ibid., pp. 147–51; Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 560–1.