Xinmeng Yang - Week2 SS1

  In this weeks’ poem reading “who killed Soek-Fang Sim?”, it is obvious that unfair treatment Sim uffered in college killed her mentally. This connects to this weeks’ theme that discrimination in academic field is still a severe issue, and fair in academia still hasn’t achieved. I don’t know whether Asian professors in UC Davis are still suffering from discrimination like Sim, but as an Asian student in American college, I have felt discriminated from one professor here. I asked discriminating center and mental health consulting for help, but it didn’t work. School didn’t allow me to drop that class because what I suffered was not defined as “discrimination” according to their definition, no matter how suffered I was. I was confused, since the group of people who suffered from discrimination were minorities, but the definition of discrimination was set by majority of the population, who may not have suffered from discrimination before. Then how they would know what being discriminated feel like?

  United States is a country which labelled as “a melting pot”, but it is still a society lead by white, which is the majority group of this country. Conformity is a common characteristic in a society, and people who are not following the majority will be somewhat excluded. I think this explains why discrimination occurs – majority group of this society push out people with different appearance, different culture, or different language, because of conformity. This makes Asian scholars hard to reach academic respect in United States. As globalization processing, I think Asians will gain more respect in the future.

Question: Sim was already a award-winning professor, why she was still affected by rumors spread among students? How does students' comments affect a professor from minority group? 

Reference:

W.P (2019) Who killed Soek-Fang Sim? 

Image: https://www.memesmonkey.com/topic/racist+asian#&gid=1&pid=6