Week 9: Micah Sakado

Micah Sakado
A02

The two articles dealing with Black Lives Matter, "Building a Culture of Solidarity: Racial Discourse, Black Lives matter, and Indigenous Social Justice" by Santos F. Ramos and "Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans" by Soya Jung, shed an interesting light on where my life lays within this rical spectrum. Ramos explains that to support BLM goes beyond relating your life to those of Black people. To support BLM is to truly understand the struggles of Black people in America and to resist against the powers causing that. My initial thought was that of ignorance; what is wrong with that? As Jung explains, Asians have faced similar oppression as a result of American institutionalized racism. Her crux is aligning how the model minority myth harms Asian Americans in the way that mass murder of Black people harms them.And sure, she does qualify it, but I do think that as asians, we do have this privileged state where we are not being systematically targeted and killed by society when compared to Black people. Given, they both have a common enemy and thus should fight them nonetheless. I sorta agree with Jung, but Ramos's argument is also compelling. I would guess that Ramos would call Ramos ignorant, but "not necessarily derived from ignorance about the problem of anti-Blackness, but sometimes from the pure desperation". So, I guess the takeway is that it is not enough to be in support of BLM via your own experiences, but to understand the struggles of Black people. Is this too radical?Perhaps...What do non-Black people have to gain from supporting BLM if according to Ramos, BLM is about fighting against Black oppression and while other poc have experiences of oppression, they are irrelevant in this fight? Am I missing the point?

This is the kind of message that Ramos wants: one that focuses on the Black population