Week 1

Joshua Omoletski

Section 3

When I came to UC Davis, I had expected the university to be a place where diversity was present, welcome and celebrated as well as social injustices being absent and frowned upon. I’ll admit, Davis is a very diverse campus, yet there are still moieties of social injustice present. Throughout my entire college life, I have been lucky enough to not experience any such injustice due to my outward appearance as a white male (despite being half Chinese). However, two of my friends have not been as lucky.

Both of them are female asian american students. One had her repeated opposition to giving consent belittled and ignored at a party purely because she’d appeared to just be “another drunk girl who couldn’t think clearly”. Luckily, her party buddy had managed to get her out of the situation. My other friend was not necessarily subjected to such a dangerous situation, but she was/is experiencing Imposter Syndrome.¹ She tells me continuously how she feels like everything she did leading up to college wasn’t good enough and that she doesn’t deserve to be enrolled here. I also recently found out that she cut off ties with some of her male friends because they would call her their abg².

Reading Fight the Tower reminded me of the injustices my aforementioned female friends have had to endure. Purely because of their gender and race, my friends were subjected to sexual objectivism by male peers as well as self-doubt as a result of sexism rooted within themselves. These everyday hardships are all the more perplexing since this is UC Davis, a university celebrated for its diverse population and widespread acceptance of all cultures. I was baffled by Prof. Valverde’s article of what she had to face when dealing with members of an entire department of faculty. You would think such unfair judgment would be absent in a professional environment; however that was quickly proven wrong using Prof. Valverde’s application for tenure and the following appeal process as examples. Universities should be a place of equal opportunity and unbiased evaluation.

 3

This video is a clip from Family Guy depicting a group of Thai girls as objects of sexual pleasure. I realize this is a comedy show and everything is just meant to make you laugh, but more than likely there has been someone who has watched this and thought that this is actually how you should treat asian/asian american women.

Question: Professor Valverde, after you received your tenure did your peers continue to harass you and mistreat you?

References:

1. Valverde, K. (2013). Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 12 (2), 377

2. “Lolzercopterzallday”. (2009, February 7). Top Definition: ABG. Retrieved from ^{http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ABG}

3. “Magnus Adrian”. (2016, March 21). Family Guy Quagmire’s Thai girls. Retrieved from ^{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awRhB270znA}