Week 1 Ivan Yang A02

In retrospect, I thought that the 10-minute compilation of the pepper-spray incident that Professor Valverde showed us was the perfect way to set the tone for this class. While watching the entire unedited scene unfold and comparing it to the heavily edited reports aired on news channels, it elicited a myriad of feelings within me, from spurts of anger towards the indifference of the police officer spraying the students to genuine fear of just how extreme our institution is willing to go to preserve their business model status quo. Along with the paper “The Time to Fight is Now”, it made me realize just how complex the systemic oppression within higher education is when factoring in the intersectionality of other marginalized identities, such as race and gender as mentioned in the paper.





Education has always been significantly prioritized among many Asian cultures as many see education as a direct correlation to social mobility. I’ve observed that this is even more poignant among different Asian American immigrant communities given the extra struggles such as discrimination and cultural shocks that further hinder us from achieving success. Therefore, it is especially disheartening to learn how the higher education system in the US was set up to benefit the oppressors and keep them in power while marginalized groups that include us are continued to be oppressed and exploited upon. Compounding the negative stereotypes, such as the “model minority” myth, it is even more disheartening to find that institutions have also racialized our ability to respond and feel anger without evoking severe repercussions as Audre Lorde and Mari Matsuda both recount. We as Asian Americans are in dire need to dismantle our stereotypes and reinvent our image to have our voices and concerns be properly accounted for by the general public. People like Yuri Kochiyama did not spend their entire lives organizing just to have API organizing hxstories to be swept under the rug.











Question: So how should we approach reinventing our image as Asian Americans in the US?






References


Valverde, Kieu- Linh Caroline (2013). Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia


“Yuri_Kochiyama.” Code Switch, NPR, 2 June 2014, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/06/02/318072652/japanese-american-activist-and-malcolm-x-ally-dies-at-93.