Tiffany Do
ASA 2 Section 2
Week 4 Blog
In response to McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male
Privilege”:
Reading McIntosh’s piece is really
interesting because it allows us to get into the perspective of someone who has
realized how much better off they are without trying and how someone can still
be oppressive to others despite knowledge of racism and discrimination. McIntosh
notes that the plight of people of color has always been taught without the
advantages of White people. One narrative is conveniently left out so that
instead of feeling overly privileged, White people begin to think of their lives
as the ideal. I have a couple reactions to this. First of all, thank goodness
for Ethnic Studies departments because now the unheard, misconstrued, and
devalued perspectives are coming to the forefront.
Secondly, I think this relates a
lot to the documentary we watched in class about the Scholarism movement in
Hong Kong. The unfair advantages of Whiteness are being left out in education
which reinforces White superiority—they’re superior because they just are, not
because this has occurred at the disadvantage of millions of people throughout
history for sociopolitical reasons. However on a more global/international scale,
there is also a rewriting of history going on, resulting in the US being seen as
the “role model” nation that everyone else should aspire to be like. Joshua
Wong compares the unfavorable situation in Hong Kong to the ideal democracy in
the US and seems to suggest that Hong Kong needs a democracy like America’s.
I think that we as a people suffer
drastically from historical amnesia. The US can also be and is very oppressive.
When the Transcontinental Railroad was built, Chinese immigrant laborers
composed a majority of the workforce, yet not a single one was pictured on the
momentous day of completion. We don’t learn about eugenics or forced
sterilization, yet we learn about the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Even
today, we don’t learn about the role the US plays in other countries (funding a
particular side of a war, aiding in violent coups, exploiting labor in the
Global South) in order to serve their own economic gain. The US is so great,
free, and prosperous… but at what cost? The failure to tell the other side of
the story is what allows for this simplified and pervasive picture of the US
being elevated onto a pedestal when it is chockfull of its own problems.
Question:
Where do Asian Americans fall within this narrative of
blatant racism and invisible privilege?
This is a link to a documentary titled “The End of America”
by Naomi Wolf (2008). Wolf describes in detail 10 tactics that authoritarian
regimes use in order to close an open society and how America has used/is using
each of these tactics.
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