Week 3 A01 Regenia Un

Regenia Un
A01
Week 3

In Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again by Nancy Chung Allred, terms like model minority and affirmative actions are widely explored. Asian Americans are regarded as “model minority” due to their high achievement but however, this leads to a situation that Asian Americans have to obtain better grades to get into certain university. In addition, although Asian Americans have obtained great achievement, they can seldom work as the executive officer of a business. Moreover, although they are recognized as “model minority”, they lose the opportunities of getting certain rights and benefits.

The term “model minority” sounds like an appreciation but from my perspective, it is actually an indirect racism and another factor that reinforces racial hierarchy and shrouds discrimination. Asian Americans do not gain any advantages being called “model”, instead, their benefits are being deprived and it enlarges the racial gap. Similarly, Affirmative Action does the same.  My hometown does not have any Affirmative Action but I know that it happens in many places around the world. In Taiwan, the native Taiwanese students can pay less tuition fee, obtain national health insurance subsidies and priority when applying for public servants. Although most of the people understand the original purpose of Affirmative Action, which is to protect certain ethnicity groups, but on the other hand, it has aroused dissatisfaction and thus widened the gap between different ethnicity groups.  Therefore, my question for this week is how do we remain the diversity of races in college without applying Affirmative Action?

This week, I want to share a YouTube video in which a couple of Asian students share their views on the term "model minority", and I truly like his conclusion sentence saying that "Don't let your race prevent you from succeeding."

Citation

Chung Allred, N. (2007). Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again. Asian American Law Journal, 14(3). Available at

http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/aalj/vol14/iss

Villanueva, C. & Ke, Andrew (2016, February 24). Retrieved April 16, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVdTRw1646k