Week 9: Bryan Ngo, A01

Week 9: Bryan Ngo, A01

Week 9:

Bryan Ngo

ASA 002

A01

Nadine Naber’s So Our History Doesn’t Become Your Future talks about the origins of some of our solidarity groups come from. Naber uses the unfortunate cultural backlashes of the 9-11 as an explanation for why these solidarity groups came to be. Multiracial organizations were created with the goal of mitigating the oppressive behavior experienced by these cultures (Arab, Afghan, South Asian, Muslim, etc). These solidarity groups come from the fact that these different cultures have all experienced similar backlashes. Through common ground, coalition groups can start forming to fight back the backlash gained from, in this case, global conflict. Since the 9-11 attacks, people find many reasons to band together for a common goal; one of the most recent ones being the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. What’s interesting is that many other solidarity groups stemmed off of the BLM movement. Suddenly, we started seeing organizations chanting, “All Lives Matter”, or “Asian Lives Matter”, or “Brown Lives Matter” – all aiming to resolve a culturally specific problem. I say this is interesting because there are many cultural groups that have experienced oppression in one way or another. In the future, it seems as if this proliferation of solidarity groups will be impossible to address. There’s no way we can address the individual needs of each individual group, so we need to find a unifying solution to cultural mistreatment in western culture.

Question:

As I said earlier, we are experiencing this proliferation of solidarity groups, each with a slightly different purpose and audience. My question is, how can we prevent all of these groups from being spread too thin? Too many people want too many things, and I think it’s unrealistic to expect all of these requests / problems to be fixed per solidarity group. So, is it possible to come up with a unifying solution to address everyone’s needs?

References:

Naber, Nadine. (2002, October). “So Our History Doesn’t Become Your Future.” Project Muse Retrieved November 18, 2017.

About Solidarity Week. (2011, March 19). Retrieved November 19, 2017, from https://solidarityweek.wordpress.com/about/