Week 2 Ivan Yang A02

As someone who is considering future career options in academia and non-profit organizations, I was quite shocked to learn about the depressing history of modern public education in the US in Lee’s paper. Never would I have imagined that individuals such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other highly revered industrialists in history would have engaged in such a massive and long lasting project of crime against humanity, permeating from publications and production of brainwashed professionals to influencing the Executive Branch of the US Government on education policies.

Some factors of this complex oppressive system also include race, which has led to the implementation of affirmative action policies in different educational institutions, particularly in higher education systems. However, many conflicts have arisen between different members of the Asian American community on the benefits of affirmative actions as the large numbers of Asian Americans in higher education has led to Asian Americans needing to prove themselves even more to secure a spot. Having grown up under quite a conservative environment, I also found myself initially agreeing with the reasons behind this argument, but Allred’s paper has allowed me to understand just how detrimental eradicating affirmative action would be and how this is all just a ploy set up by the majority white administration and conservative pundits in getting us as Asian Americans into pitting against other marginalized groups in the US, thus playing further into the model minority myth.

I have always been critical of the grouping of “Asian Americans” as we have such a spectrum of cultures and ethnicities with almost nothing in common except the fact that our ancestors come from a geographically similar area, and such a generalization does nothing but erasing the nuanced narratives that “Asian Americans” possess. Poon and Byrd’s paper further substantiates the fact that many Asian American groups do face significant challenges in accessing different opportunities particularly in higher education admissions, thus also unpacking the myth of a monolithic Asian American group. I found a graph that shows the drastic difference in admissions according to different Asian ethnicities specifically in UCLA in 2010.

Question: To what extent would our lives as Asian Americans improve if we were to scrap the term “Asian American” and only be identified according to our ethnicity?


References
Allred, N.C. (2007, January). Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again. Asian American Law Journal.
ICount. “Distance From Mean AAPI Admit Rate for AAPI Sub-Groups at UCLA, 2010.” AAPI Data, aapidata.com/icount/.
Lee, Jamie. (2014, Jan). The Untold History of Modern U.S. Education: The Founding Fathers.
Poon, O.Y.. and Byrd, A. (2013). Beyond Tiger Mom Anxiety: Ethnic, Gender and Generational Differences in Asian American College Access and Choices. Journal of College Admissions.