Week 10: Alexander Soong

Alexander Soong
ASA 2 A03
Week 10


As I was reading "The Time to Fight is Now: When Asian American Women in Academia Go Rougue", I felt as if I was reading an amalgamation of all the readings and topics we covered this quarter. Topics like model minority, social engineering and gender disparity were common themes that appeared in the article by Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis. I felt somewhat conflicted though, reading about Asian American Women's struggles in academia. The model minority myth has led to such immense pressure on Asian Americans to exceed in school, and created expectations of what kind of future Asian American students need to lead. Why are such high expectations placed on the Asian Americans, if in reality this perception of academic excellence and financial freedom does not allow them to pursue a career of interest? Being the last blog post of the quarter, I'v done a lot of reflection while reading and writing this post. Definitely something that came to mind was our presentation topic towards the beginning of the quarter which was Corporatization of the University. These issues that single out Asian American females are not only present in academia, similar problems occur in the political space, and in industry. Most notably to me is the technology industry, and the idea of "bro culture". Many up and coming start up companies are run by a bunch of well qualified software engineers, and they are raking in millions dollars of investments. This may lead them to be cocky and full of themselves, and appear as "douchebags". The Douchebagery and the mindset gives them a false sense of being dominant over others and over genders. I know this gender and sexual harassment issue has been in the news regarding companies like Uber and Tesla. My lasting thoughts will be that whichever minority you are from, ethnic, sexuality or gender, you will need to continue fight for your equality, and right to be treated as equals. Sure, things like the model minority may give people the idea that we are well off, but if people just dug a little deeper into contemporary issues, they would agree that the fight is far from over. 

Question:
It's clear that these issues, are common in academia, industry and even popular culture. Will there ever be a point when minorities are not seen as the minority? 

References:

1. Valverde, C. & Dariotis, W. M. (2017). “The Time to Fight Is Now”: When Asian American Women in Academia Go Rogue. Retrieved November 26, 2017.

2. Enright, Lynn. “Uber Has a Major Sexual Harassment Problem.” The Pool, 20 Feb. 2017, www.the-pool.com/news-views/latest-news/2017/8/uber-has-a-major-sexual-harassment-problem.