Section A01
Week 1
This week's reading, titled Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia by Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde really resonated with me in terms of my opinions on the current state of the educational system here in the United States. As an international student, I have always realized that the education system here favors Americans, as any country should. However, one thing that I have learned from the reading is that there is an extra clause to this, in which people of color in America are not favored nearly as much as "pure-blooded" Americans. There are a lot of themes that I can personally relate to in this, such as the unwillingness to seek help for illness/disability due to my culture seeing them 'as flaws to be kept secret'. This is an issue I see every day back home in Indonesia, with people getting locked up in extreme cases*. One thing I applaud the author for is that instead of letting her culture's preconceived notions about mental illness affect her, she embraced it and sought out help which would eventually reap benefits in the long run. One question that came to mind when reading was: "What can be done to encourage other Asian-Americans/Asians to push past the stigma their culture has and seek the necessary help needed to excel in an environment where they are already oppressed.
References:
Valverde, K., (2013). “Fight the Tower”: A Call to Action for Women in Academia, 12(2), 367-419. Retrieved September 28, 2017.
Mackay, A. (2015, February 25) [Image]. Stopping stigma early. Retrieved October 01, 2017, from https://unspokenpolitics.net/2015/02/26/stopping-stigma-early/
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