Matthew Ko ASA 002 A01 week 10

For this week, I read WP's poem, "My Kintsuki", and Professor Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis' written texts, "Conclusion: Academics Awaken: Power, Resistance, and Being Woke". Both of these written pieces really tied well together and conveyed strong messages that relates to the main takeaways from this class and recent events. To start off with WP's poem, the Kintsuki that she talks about refers to a traditional Japanese art where broken pottery are glued together with gold. This is very symbolic because not conveys the idea that no matter hoe broken something is, there is always hope and an opportunity to fix it. Similarly to this "broken pottery", a "broken academic system" filled with racism and oppression also has the opportunity of being fixed. In the beginning of the poem, WP admits how she was about to give up on herself, but she then got motivation from God to keep standing up for her rights. WP ends up concluding that we don't necessarily need to get rid of the system completely, but we mainly need to reform it. In professor's Valverde's conclusion, she lists ways in which we can help fight the system. One of the ways to do this is to replace academic positions with more women of color. However, it has been prominent in the Asian community to remain quiet in order to show respect, and so that is why such change has been tough for the Asian American community. Both of these ideas are really similar to the current events of the unjust killing of George Floyd. The death of George Floyd could have also been avoided if the Asian Cop decided to step up and intervene with his partner to ask him to stop kneeling on Mr. Floyd. Nevertheless, the Asian Cop remained silent and simply observed the cop suffocating Mr Floyd, most likely thinking that he did not want to lose respect from the cop. This event is an actual representation of how dangerous it is for Asian Americans to keep silent: It can literally be the difference between life or death. It is therefore important for more and more Asian Americans to step up not only for their own rights, but for the rights of other people of color as well. To refer to the bigger issue, one way to reform the broken system of the police field is to - similarly to what Professor Valverde said - replace more white officers with people of color. I genuinely believe that as long as there will be more white cops than non-white cops, we will unfortunately continue to see such tragedy repeat itself again.

One question that I have is: what will it take to get more and more Asian Americans to start speaking up itself? And, what are the steps we can take to get mote people of color to become police officers?







Reference:

Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars' Resistance and Renewal in the Academy, by Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis, Rutgers University Press, 2020, pp. 423-441.

Malik, Mayeen. (2020) "George Floyd: How Asian Americans Failed Black Americans in the Struggle for Racial Justice" [Photograph] Retrieved from:
https://medium.com/@iamayeenm/george-floyd-how-asian-americans-failed-black-people-b8ea99a22512