Week 8 - Alan Sani

Alan Sani
A03
Week 8

 In this week’s reading What Asian Americans are Bringing to Campus movements for Racial Justice the author Mark Tseng Putterman discusses the difficult position that Asian Americans hold in conversations and movements involving racial justice and inequality. The author acknowledges that there is a large grey area for Asian Americans in these spaces. Asian Americans as the “model minority” have to find a good balance of understanding the needs of their own communities and the privilege they hold as Asian Americans in order to stand in solidarity with other communities of color. All of the situations that the author sites are from incidents at Universities where Asian American students have clashed with other communities of color. This is a very valuable conversation for Asian American college students to have in order to understand how to navigate ourselves in these situations, especially in a time where issues with racial equality and tension are at a high. This is a very important issue to myself personally because I am an Indonesian Muslim American with dark brown skin. Although I do agree with the author that we as Asian Americans must understand our privilege and the needs of our community I have always felt that there are many struggles within the Asian American community that are often ignored or forgotten. I have always felt like I am constantly fighting for spaces for myself in areas where they are not always welcomed. I identify with the Asian American community and I feel my struggles aren’t recognized by the public. Non-Asian communities of color would tell me that I don’t understand their struggle because I am Asian and we are the model minority at the end of the day. But I don’t always face the same issues as other Asian Americans. because of my dark skin and religion, I have faced similar prejudice to groups within other dark-skinned communities and middle eastern Muslim communities. Understanding one’s own privilege is one of the most important factors for communities of color to stand together in the fight for racial and socioeconomic equality. However the first step to this is to understand the communities around and to respect their backgrounds and experiences.

https://youtu.be/_dg86g-QlM0 

This video can help people understand how to be an "Ally" from a non-asian American perspective. 

Question: How are minority groups within the Asian American community supposed to have their issues heard of Asian American issues are not accepted as a whole by other communities of color?