week 1- Lucero Hernandez Cruz A04

In the reading by Valverde on “‘The time to Fight is Now’: Asian American Women, Academia’s Socially engineered ‘Privileged Oppressed,’ Go rogue” touches on key aspects that we touched in lecture on the model minority and what I believe is going to be an important key to break various stereotypes and understand from the roots where it came from. One of the things that surprised me was that from the beginning only those that were elite could even think of the possibility of becoming “someone” and everyone else would just be like a machine that could be easily molded to their liking. One of the questions asked during the lecture was what was race and ethnicity, this sparked the idea that either term may cause some identity crisis because they can be constricting to an individuals identity. Furthermore, this ties in with how the idea that female Asian Americans are the model minority because from the beginning they are told to be polite and not question higher authority, but at the same time they are pressured to be smart without outsmarting those within the elite group. This concept of the elite, which is made up of wealthy white males,  is what guides our educational system because they are the reason why many colleges are becoming like a marketing system. Also, by instilling the ideology of minorities being inferior it causes the fear in going against those in power as described with the female Asian Americans, whom in simple terms are just a pretty “exotic” face as described in the article. This further gives the false illusion that they have the possibility to achieve more like their male counterpart whether it be a raise, promotion, etc, but they are misled as those in power place the barrier for how much success they can acquire and aspire to. In the end, after reading the narrative and watching the pepper spray video it illustrates how powerful people are despite their race, gender, religion when they unite for the same cause. 

Question: For the most part I would like to believe we are more open-minded , but would there ever be the possibility of stopping the creation of barriers/gaps? What are the possible ways we can prepare the future generations for the issues we are dealing with today? 

Reference: 

Klaus, P. (2010). Neither Men Nor Mice. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/jobs/07preoccupations.html [image]

Valverde, K-L.C. (2013). Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia. Seattle Journal for Social Justice. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1694&context=sjsj