The Tiger Mom and the Lie of Meritocracy

By Sarah Jones, The Cut

12 June 19

n her controversial 2011 memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Yale law professor Amy Chua admits that she once sent her toddler daughter Lulu to stand outside in 20-degree weather wearing only a skirt and a sweater. Lulu was banished for an act of musical overenthusiasm; she kept smashing keys on the piano, while her mother wanted her to press one at a time. Chua offered Lulu a choice. Stop, or go outside. Lulu chose the outdoors. In the book, Chua relates the episode as a prelude of parenting battles to come; as a mom, she says she was a harsh taskmaster, prone to excesses she occasionally regrets. But all the pushing, all the rules, all those inordinately high expectations, stemmed from one impulse: she wanted her daughters to succeed — to become accomplished musicians and star students, the sort of people who scale the heights of America’s meritocracy.

Nearly ten years after the publication of her book, it looked like Chua’s methods worked. Her daughters ascended the ranks of American excellence and attended Ivy League schools. Sophia, the oldest, graduated from Yale Law School just last year. And on Monday, she had a new accomplishment to announce: a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. For aspiring lawyers, Supreme Court clerkships are highly desirable — they’re tickets to positions at the best firms, or the first step in a career that may someday culminate in the clerk’s own judgeship. But Sophia’s achievement may have little to do with her mother’s parenting, or the work ethic she supposedly prized. In July 2018, Chua lauded Kavanaugh’s credentials as an advocate for women in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal. For her own daughter, she wrote, “there is no judge I would trust more than Brett Kavanaugh to be, in one former clerk’s words, ‘a teacher, advocate, and friend.’” At the time, Chua faced criticism that her op-ed was intended to give her daughter a spot working for Kavanaugh, something Sophia denied, claiming she had no intention of taking on a clerkship in the coming year because she had to finish her ROTC obligation after graduating. Eleven months later, here we are.

Meritocracy was always the myth at the heart of the tiger mother brand. Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, are professors at Yale Law School, the same institution that later graduated their daughter Sophia. As children, both daughters attended the Hopkins School in New Haven, which boasted tuition costs of $43,500 during the 2018–2019 academic year. Chua and Rubenfeld are stars in the legal field, and Chua in particular has a reputation for successfully placing Yale graduates in high-profile clerkships. Their children were bound for the Ivy League no matter how well they played the piano, or how long they stood in the cold. The Kavanaugh clerkship is gilt leaf on an already privileged life.

Chua defended Kavanaugh before the nation learned that Christine Blasey Ford had credibly accused him of sexual assault, and there’s no evidence she knew about Blasey Ford before everyone else did. But she may have known that Kavanaugh wasn’t the woman-respecting paragon she’d made him out to be in public. A Guardian report, published in September 2018, alleged that Chua urged female students to dress a certain way, all the better to appeal to Kavanaugh. Chua told students that it was “no accident” that Kavanaugh’s female clerks “looked like models,” sources told the news outlet. Students “reacted with surprise, and quickly pointed out that Chua’s own daughter was due to clerk for Kavanaugh,” the Guardian continued. “A source said that Chua quickly responded, saying that her own daughter would not put up with any inappropriate behaviour.”

Women less well-connected than Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld have fought back against sexual harassment at work. But the costs can be enormous, whether a woman has a job in Hollywood or at McDonald’s, and a law clerk whose parents are professors at Yale Law has advantages over nearly everyone else. The Chua-Rubenfeld household ought to be familiar with that imbalance of social power. They stand accused of benefiting from it in an especially direct fashion. Last October, Dahlia Lithwick and Susan Matthews of Slate reported that Yale was investigating Rubenfeld for inappropriate comments and flirtatious behavior with students. Some feared reprisal if they reported him. “For students who don’t arrive at Yale with fancy last names, getting a position working for a federal judge can be as much about networking as it is about academic performance,” the duo wrote.

In a 2016 speech on poverty and academic opportunity, David Cameron, then the Conservative prime minister of the U.K., told his audience that character and persistence are “core to success.” “It is what the Tiger Mother’s battle hymn is all about: work, try hard, believe you can succeed, get up and try again,” he said. But in the absence of other privileges, hard work and talent count for little. Sycophantry, powerful allies, a commitment to the same broken system that enriched her while disadvantaging others; that’s Amy Chua’s real battle hymn, and that’s all she has to teach us.

Chelsea Manning Against the Grand Jury

By Lida Maxwell and Sonali Chakravarti, Jacobin

12 June 19

Chelsea Manning was recently jailed for refusing to testify in a grand jury investigation against Julian Assange. Her refusal is an act of resistance against the abusive use of grand juries and prosecutorial intimidation.

lmost a month ago Chelsea Manning was released from jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange. She explained her refusal: “I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”

For this she was held in civil contempt and incarcerated for two months, including in solitary confinement.

Her release came with the dissolution of the grand jury, but she was issued another subpoena for another grand jury investigating Assange and has been imprisoned again. This time, the judge is also imposing a fine of $500 per day after thirty days, and $1,000 per day after sixty days.

Her actions are being treated as an individual act of resistance. But if we put them in context — of her previous actions and the history of the grand jury — her resistance opens up opportunities for collective action and solidarity, especially in regard to unchecked prosecutorial power.

This is, of course, not the first time that Manning has refused to comply with the law because of her commitment to public transparency. In 2010, Manning, then a soldier in the US Army, leaked huge amounts of classified government documents to Wikileaks that detailed US abuses in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: unreported killing of civilians; the failure to adequately investigate accusations of torture; increased use of drones; and the use of special units to track down and kill individuals without trial, among other things.

While no mainstream public intellectuals spoke up on her behalf then, we might expect more to do so now, especially since so many journalists have been lauding the goods of governmental “transparency” and “facts” in the wake of the Trump candidacy and presidency. Yet only a few journalists in publications like Teen Vogue and the Intercept have spoken up recently on behalf of Manning. Perhaps this is because Manning’s commitment to transparency goes beyond empty platitudes.

For Manning, transparency is important not as a vague good in itself. Rather, transparency is important because it enables democratic political action and solidarity — especially among those vulnerable to state violence — and because secrecy has so often been used as a tool of oppression and control.

While Manning’s earlier leaking of classified documents about American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are often portrayed by her supporters as “whistleblowing,” the significance of Manning’s actions in 2010 and now comes more clearly into view if we see them as “outsider truth-telling,” a practice of telling the truth that (1) is not aimed (as with the whistleblower) only at remedying a particular wrong, but also at showing problems with institutionalized forms of secrecy; and (2) aims not only at holding wrongdoers accountable, but also works to change the world so that those on the margins (on the “outside”) — like Manning — might be seen as significant public speakers of truth. Manning’s recent refusal to testify should be seen as an act of outsider truth-telling that shows the violence of legal procedures that are supposedly neutral and purely fact-centered and changes the world so that we might value and listen to voices that are often excluded and devalued.

While grand juries now appear as a routinized part of the criminal justice system, they were originally a site of popular voice and empowerment. Imported from the common law system in England, grand juries along with petit juries (or trial juries) were meant to act as a check on the abuse of power by the state. Before a criminal charge could be brought by the king, a grand jury had to determine whether the evidence warranted it.

During the colonial period, a grand jury was convened in 1733 to determine whether publisher John Zenger should be charged with libel for insulting the royal governor. They voted against it, functioning as a check not only on the abuse of power by the crown but also against the implications of the charge for the freedom of the press. Grand juries are used to investigate circumstances where a crime may have occurred but further evidence is needed, including organized crime.

But they have also been used to gather information about constitutionally protected activity (such as the freedom of assembly) by those involved with social movements, including the environmental movement and the LGBTQ movement — for example, by secretly calling members of the community who were protesting the pipeline at Standing Rock to testify, law enforcement created conditions of distrust and fear of imminent arrest. Leaders in the Puerto Rican independence movement have organized campaigns informing community members about their rights before federal grand juries because they have long been the focus of such inquiries.

Manning’s refusal to speak to the grand jury draws attention to the ways grand juries now function in a way opposite to their original function: their broad mandate to secretly investigate and coerce individuals to share information makes them a tool of intimidation by the state.

The secrecy of grand jury hearings, while meant to protect the confidentiality of witnesses, ends up making them even more prone to prosecutorial abuse. All topics are permissible during grand jury questioning, and no judge is present. Furthermore, subpoenas for witnesses are not difficult for prosecutors to obtain, and there are no opposing lawyers to question why witnesses are being asked to give details about actions protected by the Constitution.

Those who serve as jurors, while expected to represent peers of those who may be charged, find it difficult to go against a prosecutor motivated to convict. Grand juries indict in 98 percent of cases.

What might be done to restore juries, both grand and petit, to better serve their distinct function as a barrier against unchecked prosecutorial power?

The first is to follow the lead of Chelsea Manning’s distinctive commitment to transparency. Making public the fact of her subpoena and her refusal to be further involved with the investigation, Manning resisted secrecy as a tool of control and sought to enable and expand forms of democratic solidarity, showing us how to assess grand jury proceedings: not narrowly, in terms of whether the law is followed, but more expansively, in terms of how well they further goals of democratic empowerment.

Here, context matters. Given that the charge against Assange proceeded without her testimony, it seems clear that the call for Manning’s testimony has more to do with targeting activists — and punishing Manning in particular. In contrast, when subpoenas are issued (as in the case of President Trump’s financial documents and of Donald Trump Jr. being asked to provide information to the Senate Intelligence Committee) for the purpose of congressional oversight and a check on unitary executive power, they are on the side of democratic empowerment. Looked at in context, Trump’s and his son’s resistance to the subpoenas runs contrary to the democratic spirit of the grand jury.

Second, voters should select prosecutors who share their views about the potential for the abuse of grand jury powers. As Emily Bazelon has written in her new book Charged, the discretion attributed to prosecutors in determining charges is dramatically out of balance with the judge and the jury, two other discretionary nodes. Voters have the power to change the ideology of criminal prosecution at its most influential point.

Third, greater education about jury service is sorely needed. Currently what jurors understand about their responsibilities comes mainly from the video they are shown at the beginning of jury duty (and what they have gleaned from true crime television shows and podcasts). Community workshops and teach-ins are needed to teach jurors about their range of responsibilities and common examples of bias during jury deliberation.

They do not know, for example, that they have the power to nullify — that is, to not indict during a grand jury or to find a defendant not guilty during a trial regardless of the evidence in the case. This right of nullification is the linchpin that holds together the jury’s responsibility to stop unjust punishment by the state, beginning with the process of indictment. Resisting a subpoena to appear before a grand jury and serving as a juror for one are two types of what Chakravarti calls “radical enfranchisement,” understanding that citizenship calls for a differentiation between law and justice at critical moments.

Finally, the commonsense view that refusing to participate in the grand jury process is automatically contrary to the aim of justice is wrong. What Chelsea Manning’s actions show is that outsider truth-telling (not just compelled testimony on the stand) and resistance to prosecutorial intimidation (not just compliance with a prosecutor) reflect the democratic spirit of jury service, and especially the possibility of furthering and expanding democracy, rather than contracting it, through the law.