Week 8

Kimi Villaroman
A01
Week 8

In Mark Putterman’s article “What Asian Americans Are Bringing to Campus Movements for Racial Justice”, he highlights important Asian American issues such as aligning as allies to other people of color issues, the struggle for Asian American studies, apathy to the cause, and so much more. With an overwhelming increase in the number of Asian Americans enrolled in higher education, there has been an increased demand in our representation in the academia, seen through the Northwestern students’ hunger strike resulting in an Asian American studies minor in 1999. Since the demand for an Ethnic Studies program at SFSU happened in 1968, more and more Asian Americans are realizing that the first way to combat whiteness in an institution not made for them is to create a space for them to explore their identity in higher education. For example, Yale only offered less than two courses in Asian American studies out of 2000 undergraduate courses. Without the right tools and knowledge about history of self which lead to inspiration and motivation, there can be no radical changes in the representation of Asian America. With courses catered to our communities, we can start seeing our university as our spaces, our homes, our institutions. With that realization and mindset, we can become real agents of change within our academy. Other ways we can combat for racial justice on campus is by standing in solidarity with our fellow people of color while fighting for our own experiences. A quote from the article that I really like is “when you lift the most marginalized community up, everyone improves.” Putterman addresses the ways we can be an ally to the Black Lives Movement, and sometimes, that means knowing when to keep quiet and just stand in solidarity with your fellow oppressed. I see this happening in my own Filipinx-American community. We have this organization on campus called BRIDGE, dedicated to the outreach and retention of high school and college students. They are student activists in our community, fighting tooth and nail for our representation in the academia. Last year, during a protest, they stood in solidarity in the Black Lives Matter Movement and became a Black ally without crossing any lines. In response to that, they created a workshop for the Fil-Am leaders during a retreat on how to be a better ally to other POC, and one of the most important points was knowing when to keep our mouth shut in fear that the other community would believe we could do their work on their issues better than they can.

Question: How can you effectively rally Asian Americans to a certain cause in spite of the political apathy that many seem to have?

Resources:
Putterman, M. T. (2016, February 1). What Asian Americans Are Bringing to Campus Movements for Racial Justice. Race files. Retrieved May 21, 2017.
AARW. (2016, September 9). APIs for Black Lives Boston. Image. Retrieved May 21, 2017.