Week 7 - Joanne Agus

The Berkeley's Free Speech Movement stood out to me because of how empowering the event was. It made me realize that we have taken for granted the very voice that students in the past should fight for, and that the UCs have not always been accepting of the students' opinions until this movement. 

This surprised me because when I decided to go to college in California, I have always assumed that California just happens to be an accepting and liberal even from the start, and so as I read through the struggle and history of this movement, I can finally see how it resembles the kind of struggles that people in Indonesia also faced. 

The Berkeley FSM article mentioned about McCarthyism as a source of fear for students in the 1950s for freedom of expression, and that in a way, Senator Joseph McCarthy linked "radical political activity with disloyalty"(Cohen, 1985). This fright was also reflected in Indonesia's President Suharto's era, whereby citizens who decided to speak their minds against the ideals of the government, at that time, were criminalized. In a more extreme case, even citizens who did celebrated other ethnic celebrations - citizens of Chinese and Japanese descendants- were also deemed disloyal and can be criminalized. These acts include using names that reflects any roots from other cultures, or even speaking languages other than Indonesian. 

How I feel like this reflects freedom of speech nowadays is that although all students, faculties, and staffs in colleges have the right to speak out their minds, there are still ways that college institutions place different values of free speeches in different ethnicity. This may be because some people still believe that if you're not white, then you're not american, and that means that you don't get to have the same right and same privileges for voicing your thoughts.

To me, these two  reoccurrence really proved that people still tie the meaning of equal rights for freedom of speech to race and ethnicity.

This picture was taken in 1998, during the peak of the Anti-chinese sentiment in Indonesia (1998).

References:

Cohen, R. (1984, April). Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the Way for Campus Activism. OAH Magazine of History, 1(1), pp. 16-18.

Anti-Chinese sentiment reached its peak in May 1998 (1998). Office of the Vice President The Republic of Indonesia [digital image]. Retrieved 14th of May, 2017 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Indonesians#/media/File:Jakarta_riot_14_May_1998.jpg