Week 9 Elizabeth Chang

Elizabeth Chang

Section 1

Week 9

This week’s reading includes Soya Jung’s “Why Ferguson matters to Asian Americans”. The article focuses on an incident in Ferguson, where Mike Brown, an African American, was shot to death by Darren Wilson, a European American police officer. The author talks about how this event’s consequences affects Asian Americans. Jung states that because of the overly common portrayal of the Black Lives Matter movement involving all the crimes and deaths of African Americans, it overshadows the deaths and crimes towards other ethnicities, especially Asian Americans. The author further states that absence of Asian American deaths in the media “serves as a beacon when faced with the racial quandary that Asian Americans must navigate”. Asian Americans are always being places in the chasm between African Americans and European Americans, leading to invisibility.

I agree with the author in the sense that because of all the attention given to both sides of the spectrum (blackness and whiteness), Asian Americans are often forgotten because we do not really fit into either category. I believe that because of the frequent portrayal of the injustice in the media towards African Americans, society as a whole is more inclined to think that this kind of social injustice happens only to a certain racial group, when it really happens to all of the racial minority groups. This applies to the Model Minority stereotype since the majority of the people thinks that because Asian Americans are such models, the crimes and events related to social injustice doesn’t apply to us.

Question: What can be done to “let people know” about the injustice that other minorities are also facing?

References

Jung, S. (2014, August 20). Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans. Race Files.

Kelety, J. (2015, November 30). Black Lives Matter Protesters Make Strong Showing on Black Friday | Seattle Politics. Retrieved May 28, 2017, from https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2015/11/30/black-lives-matter-and-black-friday