Week 1

Joanne Agus
Section: A01

Fight The Tower is a story about professor Valverde’s struggle in applying and getting tenure. Throughout her struggle she faced discrimination by both the institution and colleagues from the department, which caused stress and lead to a life-threatening miscarriage. She explained that discrimination within her working community applied to her in multiple aspects – being Vietnamese, mixed raced, mentally disabled, a woman, and a mother. Fortunately, I don’t think that I have been discriminated as an Indonesian international student at UC Davis because I feel like the community really celebrates diversity. Despite of that, I can see why professor Valverde’s experience would be prevalent amongst other women of colour in academia through my own experience. Growing up as an Indonesian with a Chinese background and a catholic religion placed me as a double minority in my Indonesian community. I felt oppressed and judged whenever I didn’t fully understand the common Muslim practices since religion is deeply engrained in our high school education, and that the majority of Indonesians are Muslims. Although most of them may seem like trivial microagressions, I truly believe that this normalizes the idea of discrimination against minorities. As mentioned in the article, these microagressions are “difficult to prove and taken seriously" (Valverde, 2013). Evidently, these microagressions developed into a normalized discrimination that applies to acceptance rate of student’s application to higher education. In a way, without people voicing their opinions about it, we have accepted the idea that “it’s just how it is” and that “it’s better to lay low than to make yourself standout and be attacked by the society”. This also means that the community that I lived in before moving to Davis has normalized victim blaming against the minority. Professor Valverde’s article really empowered me to take strategic steps and voice my opinion to battle against discrimination especially in academia.

The poster bellow is an online advertisement of tutoring business that only accepts students who wears hijabs in Indonesia (Bintang Pelajar, 2013). 

1.     Valverde, K. (2013). Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 12(2), 5. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sjsj/vol12/iss2/5

2.     Bintang Pelajar. (2013). [Website poster advertisement for a tutoring business]. GHL Mahasiswa. Retrieved from http://karir.bintangpelajar.com/2013/03/13/fusce-nec-odio-elit-in-interdum-velit/

Q: What causes the believe of a "dominant race" within the asian american community? (pg. 390, Section H. Class Bias)