The Triple Package (42 page)

“pauper county”
:
Monica Potts, “Pressing on the Upward Way,”
The American Prospect
, June 12, 2012.

according to some
:
“America’s Poorest County: Proud Appalachians Who Live Without Running Water or Power in Region Where 40% Fall Below Poverty Line,”
Daily Mail
, Apr. 23, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134196/Pictured-The-modern-day-poverty-Kentucky-people-live-running-water-electricity.html.

By statute, Stuyvesant High School
:
Al Baker, “Charges of Bias in Admission Test Policy at Eight Elite Public High Schools,”
New York Times
, Sept. 27, 2012 (“In May 1971, after officials began thinking about adding other criteria for admission, protests from many parents, mostly white, persuaded the State Legislature to enshrine the rule in state law”).

tuition
:
See the Phillips Exeter website, http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/109_1370].aspx; see also Raquel Laneri, “America’s Best Prep Schools,” Forbes.com, Apr. 29, 2010, http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/29/best-prep-schools-2010-opinions-private-education.html (reporting that Phillips Exeter sends roughly 29 percent of its graduates to the Ivy League, Stanford, or MIT).

Stuyvesant reportedly sends upwards of 25 percent
:
See Insideschools.Org, http://insideschools.org/high/browse/school/97.

the school’s new admittees
:
Thomas Sowell, “Of Stuyvesant, Tests, and Tiger Moms,”
New York Post
, Apr. 9, 2013; Warren Kozak, “Call Them Tiger Students. And Get to Work,”
Wall Street Journal
, Apr. 4, 2013.

Bronx Science
:
See “Asian Group Critical of Test Policy,”
Crain’s Insider
, Oct. 4, 2012 (“Asian Americans fill 72 percent of seats at Stuyvesant, 64 percent at Bronx High School of Science”).

Sunset Park
:
Beth Fertig, “Around Sunset Park, Tutoring Is Key to Top High Schools,” WNYC SchoolBook, Mar. 12, 2013, http://www.schoolbook.org/2013/03/12/around-sunset-park-tutoring-is-key-to-top-high-schools.

head start that Asian immigrants bring with them
:
See Richard Alba and Victor Nee,
Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 174–5, 203–4, 209; Nancy Foner,
From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 163; Haskins, “Immigration: Wages, Education, and Mobility,” p. 82.

“family reunification”
:
Alba and Nee,
Remaking the American Mainstream
, p. 187; Pew Research Center,
Second-Generation Americans
, p. 35 (“Asian immigrants are more likely than those from other regions to be admitted on employment visas.”).

cream of the intellectual crop
:
Thomas L. Friedman,
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), pp. 104–5; David Lague, “1977 Exam Opened Escape Route into China’s Elite,”
New York Times
, Jan. 6, 2008.

more likely to be restaurant or factory workers
:
Fertig, “Around Sunset Park.”

a majority of Chinese immigrants
:
In 2010, 54 percent of legal immigrants from mainland China and Hong Kong obtained residence through family-based criteria. Kristen McCabe, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Information Source, January 2012, http://migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=876#9.

“bimodal”
 . . . exceptional academic success:
Rumbaut, “Paradise Shift,” p. 12; Rumbaut, “The Coming of the Second Generation,” p. 208; see also Renee Reichl Luthra and Roger Waldinger, “Intergenerational Mobility,” in David Card and Steven Raphael, eds.,
Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), pp. 169, 192, 196 (second-generation Chinese show upward educational and occupational mobility “regardless of parental educational background”); Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizons,” in Card and Raphael,
Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality,
pp. 207, 209–11, 216, 221.

Chinese Americans’ mean IQ is no higher
:
James R. Flynn,
Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), pp. 60, 77. According to one scholar who purports to have found worldwide racial intelligence differences, Chinese IQ in some countries is significantly higher than white IQ in the United States. See Richard Lynn, “Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective,”
Mankind Quarterly
31 (1991), pp. 264–5 (reporting a median Chinese IQ of 101 in China, but 110 in Singapore and 116 in Hong Kong). But even if Lynn’s findings are credible, his own estimate of the median IQ of East Asians
in North America
is 103, almost indistinguishable from white Americans (101–2). Ibid. Moreover, as has been acknowledged even by IQ-proponents Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, Lynn’s higher Chinese IQ numbers did not incorporate certain important corrections for temporal shifts; when “such corrections were made,” Lynn’s own data showed Chinese IQ to be generally comparable to North American white IQ. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray,
The Bell
Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
(New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 272–73 (citing Lynn, “Race Differences in Intelligence”). Reevaluating Lynn’s data and other sources, Flynn found that Chinese Americans’ mean IQ appeared to be slightly below white Americans’. Flynn,
Asian Americans
, p. 1.

more bang for their intelligence buck
:
Richard E. Nisbett,
Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Culture Count
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009), p. 157; Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011), p.
195.

“If Asian students”
:
Laurence Steinberg,
Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 87.

“probably 95 out of 100 Chinese students”
:
Fertig, “Around Sunset Park”; see also Nisbett,
Intelligence and How to Get It
, p. 158 (“Asian and Asian American achievement is not mysterious. It happens by working harder”).

NAACP Legal Defense Fund
:
Baker, “Charges of Bias in Admission Test at Eight Elite Public High Schools”; Kyle Spencer, “For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones,”
New York Times
, Oct. 26, 2012.

$5,000 a year
:
Fertig, “Around Sunset Park.”

free tutoring
 . . . study “excessively” . . . “This is the easy part”:
Spencer, “For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones.”

“Most of our parents”
:
Ibid.

about half of Kentucky and Tennessee
:
For the Appalachian Regional Commission’s boundary definition of the region, see http://www.appalachiancommunityfund.org/html/wherewefund.html.

“[G]et out, stay out of people’s lives”
 . . . “[Y]our elite group”:
See Roger Catlin, “What’s on Tonight: Diane Sawyer in Appalachia; ‘Dollhouse,’”
Hartford Courant
, Courant .com, Feb. 13, 2009, http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2009/02/whats-on-tonight-diane-sawyer.html (comments).

“non-welfare drawing, non–Mountain Dew guzzling”
:
“Does Diane Sawyer Get Appalachia?,” The Revivalist, Apr. 1, 2010, http://therevivalist.info/does-diane-sawyer-get-appalachia (quoted text slightly edited by authors).

contradictory impressions
:
See, e.g., Anthony Harkins,
Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 6–7; Kai T. Erikson,
Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 84–9; Silas House and Jason Howard,
Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), pp. 1, 59, 133–5; John O’Brien,
At Home in the Heart of Appalachia
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), pp. 3–5.

“southern mountain folk”
:
Harkins,
Hillbilly
, p. 4.

crystal meth addicts
:
Zhiwei Zhang et al.,
An Analysis of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Disparities and Access to Treatment Services in the Appalachian Region
(Appalachian Regional Commission and the National Opinion Research Center, August 2008), p. 2.

Rates of cancer
 . . . fewer than 12 percent:
Appalachian Regional Commission,
Economic Overview of Appalachia–2011
, http://www.arc.gov/images/appregion/Sept2011/EconomicOverviewSept2011.pdf.

42 percent rural
:
Appalachian Regional Commission, “The Appalachian Region,” http://www.arc.gov/appalachian_region/TheAppalachianRegion.asp.

neighboring Kentucky counties
:
See Potts, “Pressing on the Upward Way.”

America’s one hundred lowest median-income counties
:
U.S. Census Bureau, “Small Area Poverty and Income Estimates” (2010 U.S. and all States and Counties data file), http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/statecounty/data/2010.html; Appalachian Regional Commission, “Counties in Appalachia,” http://www.arc.gov/counties; see also Housing Assistance Council, “Central Appalachia,” http://www.ruralhome.org/storage/documents/appalov.pdf
,
p. 58 (“Over 43 percent of Central Appalachia’s counties experienced poverty rates of 20 percent or more in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000”).

far more socially acceptable
:
See Jim Goad,
The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 15; Harkins,
Hillbilly
, p. 8.

“Our magazines and sitcoms”
:
Goad,
The Redneck Manifesto,
pp. 15, 100; see also Harkins,
Hillbilly
, especially chaps. 1 and 2; Anne Shelby, “The ‘R’ Word: What’s So Funny (and Not So Funny) About Redneck Jokes,” in Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds.,
Back Talk from an American Region: Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), pp. 153–4.

“just to go along”
 . . . “anger”:
Shelby, “The ‘R’ Word,” p. 154.

“counter the ‘dumb hillbilly’ stereotype”
:
Phillip J. Obermiller, “Paving the Way: Urban Organizations and the Image of Appalachians,” in Billings et al.,
Back Talk from an American Region
, pp. 251, 258.

perhaps contributing to the stereotypes
:
See Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee,
The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 13–4 (critiquing “culture-of-poverty” theories for “blatant stereotyping and victim blaming” and noting that even richer theories embrace “perjorative views about mountain people”).

“defeatism,” “dejection”
:
Harry M. Caudill,
Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), pp. 79, 346, 392; see also Jack E. Weller,
Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 2, 20, 37.

“Appalachian fatalism”
:
O’Brien,
At Home in the Heart of Appalachia
, p. 24.

“We’re a religious bunch”
:
House and Howard,
Something’s Rising
, pp. 52, 59.

“helpless before the God”
:
Erikson,
Everything in Its Path
, p. 85; see Weller,
Yesterday’s People
, p. 104.

working two and three jobs
:
Potts, “Pressing on the Upward Way.”

undermined by government welfare
:
Charles Murray,
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
(New York: Crown Forum, 2012), pp. 170–81, 216–9; see Caudill,
Night Comes to the Cumberlands
, pp. 275–6.

Obesity is common
:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Estimated County-Level Prevalence of Diabetes and Obesity—United States, 2007,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 58, no. 45 (2009), p. 1259 (reporting over 30 percent obesity rates in West Virginia and Appalachian Kentucky and Tennessee).

“As kids, we never learned”
:
J. D. Vance, manuscript on file with authors (New York: HarperCollins, forthcoming 2014).

abuse rates of prescription opioid painkillers
:
See “Prescription Drug Abuse in Appalachia,” http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/04/03/us/DRUGS.html; Appalachian Regional Commission, “ARC Study: Disproportionately High Rates of Substance Abuse in Appalachia,” August 2008, http://www.arc.gov/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=113; Lisa King, “Oxycontin Is the Drug of Choice of Appalachian Addicts,
The Washington Times
, June 9, 2012.

“pillbillies”
:
“Editorial: ‘Pillbilly’ Addicts,”
The Charleston Gazette
, Oct. 10, 2012.

1 in 10 newborns tested positive
:
Sabrina Tavernise, “Ohio County Losing Its Young to Painkillers’ Grip,”
New York Times
, Apr. 19, 2011.