Eric Gip
Section AO2
Week 1
Week 1
While reading Professor Valverde’s “Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia” I instantly related to the section of class bias within the Asian American community. Growing up as a Chinese American in a primarily Chinese community, I didn’t have to face much racism and discrimination around my area but the few Vietnamese kids in my elementary did.
Recess was split into two groups at my elementary, 1st through 3rd grade and 4th through 6th grade. I started noticing the discrimination towards the Vietnamese kids when I entered the 4th grade and had the intermediate recess. A group of 6th grade Chinese kids were in a circle and they were ostracizing and teasing the Vietnamese kid for not being Chinese, not allowing him to sit in the circle and eventually completely excluding and ignoring him forcing him to hang out with the more accepting non-Asian kids.
In high school I learned that Hmong and Mien culture existed and unfortunately noticed that the social hierarchy changed also, shifting the Southeast Asians to the bottom and most of the Asian Americans being more accepting of all other ethnicities except the Southeast Asians. In my freshman year, there was only 1 Hmong person among my classroom in the AP schedule my school had. For the few days she was in our class, she was quiet and only kept to herself; we later found out that she dropped because she felt alienated because she didn’t connect with any of the Chinese and Vietnamese kids. At our school, if you weren’t taking AP classes the quality of education was below average; it’s unfortunate that because of our social hierarchy, she didn’t feel comfortable taking a program that would have most likely prepared her more for higher education.
Question: How are these unspoken subconscious social hierarchies changed? Is it possible to ascend, descend, or equalize it at all?
1. Valverde, K., "Fight the Tower: A call to Action for Women in Academia" Retrieved October 8, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment