Jenna Lee ASA 002 A03 Week 3

          This week’s reading was “Introduction. ‘The Time to Fight Is Now’: Asian American Women, Academia’s Socially Engineered ‘Privileged Oppressed,’ GoRogue.” by Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis, introducing the topic of “reverse social engineering”. As the authors mentioned in the text, reverse social engineering “involves deconstructing systems of oppression to reveal the real motivations behind the actions of power holders and the (un)intended effects of their projects on society” (Dariotis & Valverde 2020). Asian American women hold the title of the “privileged oppressed”, also known as the model minority. At a glimpse, this paradoxical title may sound like a change for the better, but in reality, working up to that title in itself if a tiring process. Following the stereotypical image of a smart, obedient Asian American woman throughout one’s entire life is simply torture because the moment she slips and fails to present herself as the perfect Asian American woman, she may lose everything that she’s worked her entire life to earn. Nobody should have to hide their true self like that. This labeling of Asian Americans as the “privileged oppressed” only works to form new hierarchies of power, of which at the top will always be white men; this term feeds this ongoing oppression of all races and genders that don’t fit under “white men”.

Question
Would there ever come a time, when Asian American students stop being represented as the smart kid in the room?

References
Valverde, K.-L. C., & Dariotis, W. M. (2020). Fight the tower: Asian American women scholars resistance and renewal in the academy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Seligson, S. & Politis, B. (2015). [Photograph of a Woman Struggling from Model Minority Pressures]. Retrieved from http://www.bu.edu/articles/2015/model-minority-pressures-take-mental-health-toll