[Week 1] Omatsu Visits the Bureaucratic Prison

Leslie Do
ASA 2, Professor Valverde
TA: Josh Watkins, Section: A01
9/29/2015

Week 1: Omatsu Visits the Bureaucratic Prison 

Asian American Activism in 2015 and Beyond

Although Omatsu lists useful tools for liberating ourselves from the four prisons, Omatsu's essay The 'Four Prisons' lacks an explicit label for one more very prevalent, psychological and institutional prison relevant to today's social issues (Omatsu, 19.) As subjects within the core of the US neoliberal, neoimperialist empire, and as consumers of professionalist ideology at UC Davis, we are also contained within a fifth prison -- the bureaucratic prison (also known as Dr. Valverde's conveyor belt parable.)  The bureaucratic prison is designed to emotionally pacify, delay our counterinsurgency, and subversively subdue us by socially engineering us to resolve crises when it's too late. (This late intervention begins when the fires grow large enough to trap and consume us.) The bureaucratic prison (as a conveyor belt school of thought) was distributed by elites to socially control students and deter us from protesting and resisting against the corporate elites. The bureaucratic prison is designed to interrupt the evolution of our resistant's adaptability and strength to new designs and developments in systemic oppression. Therefore, due to oppression's evolution through its reengineering, we must be critical of who is paying us for our social justice-related labor; we must evolve our resistance against intellectual suppression and systemic, technocractic oppression. 

                                                                   Question 
1. What specific actions and schools of thought liberate us from the bureaucratic prison?

Citation

Omatsu, Glenn. "The Four Prisons and the Liberation Movement: Asian American Activism to the 1960s to 1990s." ASA 2 Reader.