This week, we will be looking over Part 3 of the Fight the Tower book. Starting with W.P.’s poem The Cost of Speaking we get a stark reminder of what it means for these groups to speak up and raise attention to the issues of discrimination. Even W.P. spoke up and “appealed to the college” as she wrote, “the president rejected the recommendation” of the appeal committee and she started facing “retaliation from all fronts” which only increased as she tried to seek help and raise further awareness.
This goes back to a previous blog post of mine, where I mentioned that in order to solve social problems, social change requires awareness to be brought to the problem. Now there is a dilemma, how can one possibly raise awareness towards this issue if this will make one an outcast? Should one risk themselves – their lives, their jobs, and their health – for an attempt at changing the system? Or should they hold their anger, ‘suffer in silence’ as they say, while letting the discrimination and ‘reserved Asian’ stereotype perpetuate?
In my opinion, we must not be defeatist. We need to have hope of breaking through the system and ‘defeating the tower.’ There are definitely many cases of those speaking out getting shut down and shunned, but there are also several cases that we have seen in this book where justice was brought upon these individuals. The difference between these cases, from what I can observe, would be the avenues through which awareness was raised. In the successful stories, we saw how these individuals were able to reach scholars from other universities, their students, and even donors to these institutions.
Paying attention to the donors, we can see how money holds the power to control. In a sense, all bad publicity can negatively affect an institution. Just look at the UCD Pepper Spray Incident which motivated the university to hide this particular incident from the public. In a sense, the university tried to ‘silence’ this since bad publicity can definitely affect the decisions of certain people, ultimately leading to less money for the university. In this sense, perhaps there would be a link between publicity, money, and power that would need to be tapped into. Perhaps there would be a way to pay for the Cost of Speaking by speaking up to the right people. I end this with a question, how can we do our part in making sure these voices that speak up do not go unheard?
W.P. (2019). The Cost of Speaking. In Fight the Tower. United States: Rutgers University Press
Donato, A. (2019, Feb 14). Speak Up [Online Image]. In Toronto Sun. Retrieved from torontosun.com
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