The “Four Prisons” Ideology

Tony Tran

Section 2

Week 1

The “Four Prisons” Ideology

            I felt the article, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s” had an idea that was thought provoking. It described how geography, history, social structure, and self were all things a person had to free themselves from. 

            For the first prison, I believed that in order to be free from geography is a time-consuming process. Contact with other ethnic people is inevitable; however, most initial contacts are one-way benefiting and require time for the two to become neutral again. 

            The second prison is history. It is something that people often don’t completely understand and have biased views on a time period. This is why the San Francisco State strike ultimately happened: to have a School of Ethnic Studies to help all people in understanding ethnic history so biased ideas can be understood accordingly. We need to have unbiased conscience and know that each other’s historical past usually can be identical in some way.

            The third prison pertains to social structure. For Asian Americans, that used to be a problem that was simply accepted and not dealt with. In that historical context, I believe that Asian Americans assumed living conditions were better than back in their native country so they just focused on pushing their next generation forward. I feel these next couple generations were the key to demystifying the whole social structure and helped push political action against such bad conditions. 

            The forth prison is self which is the simplest but most influential. We choose our path so we can push for racial freedom or just let it slide. Ultimately that is for each of us to decide and I believe we will decide accordingly once things just become unacceptable.

            I want to conclude that all four of these ‘prisons’ are intertwined in such a way that we all have went through all of these prisons maybe not physically, but through our history. Our today was built from the struggles and sweat of our past so we must acknowledge it and use it to choose our future more wisely.

Question: Is this whole racial problem still occurring in the U.S. or is the LGBTQIA the new ‘racial discrimination issue’?