Itsumi Nagakura - Week 10 - A04

Reflections

It is hard to speak about Asian-American problems when so many Black Americans are scared for their lives. It feels like our problems are "not as bad" but then again, I realise that this is all a result of the hierarchy that has been constructed within People of Colour because of the model minority myth. I realise now, that it was privileged of me to say that protests should be peaceful and people should fight with love in the past because our Black peers can no longer afford to just "fight with love" because the police only treat them with violence. Especially in a time like this, I believe it is important for Asian-Americans to understand that the fact that they can go out and face the police without fearing for their lives, is because we are used as a wedge to undermine the rights of other racial minorities. Like in Conclusion: Academics Awaken: Power, Resistance, and Being Woke "We came to recognize that even the seemingly positive stereotypes of Asians as model minorities, by which we supposedly have free access to achievement and success, is a lie deliberately built over hundreds of years to construct a wedge between potential allies—not only between differently racialized groups of color but also between Asian American women ourselves."(Location 11065 on Kindle Version) We should be angry about what is happening because we are "privileged" from how we stand on our POC peers and we as spit out once institutions are done using us as a wedge.

If I were to explain things according to the title, I would say that for Asian-Americans in higher education the power is in the faculty and for Black Americans, it is in the police. Our resistance is against the institutions and our wokeness is to realise how we fit and play into the model minority myth while Black Americans have been woke to the racism they face every day. I see Asian-Americans complaining about how they wish people would be this angered when COVID-19 happened. While I understand their anger and cannot deny that a part of me feels the same way, I have to understand that we just simply don't get KILLED BY THE POLICE because of our skin colour. In fact, Asian/Pacific Islanders have a lower lifetime risk of being killed by the police than White people (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019).

Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019

Now the fact that a graph like this needs to exist is beyond me. But you KNOW you are privileged/lucky if you are better than a white person. The model minority myth that labels us as sensible and obedient is in a way saving us but it labels our Black peers a violent as a consequence. Fearing for your life is no longer a race problem anymore, it is a human rights problem. We are fighting police brutality stemming from racism.

Payne, 2003

Works Cited

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. (Kindle Version) 

Edwards, Frank, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito. “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex.” PNAS. National Academy of Sciences, August 20, 2019. https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793.

Payne, Roz. Yellow Peril Supports Black Power. Photograph. Oakland, California, n.d. The International Center of Photography. https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/yellow-peril-supports-black-power-oakland-california