Joseph Tiu ASA 002 A03 Week 10

           This week, I read Conclusion: Academics Awaken: Power, Resistance, and Being Woke by Valverde and Dariotis. I feel that this chapter is an apt conclusion, not just for the book, but also for our class. Though we didn’t really have any midterms or long essays to write, I feel that we were still able to learn a lot from this class and the readings that were assigned to us and this conclusion summarizes all these things in a way. From the Model Minority Myth, to the Privileged Oppressed, to Social Engineering, this class has made me more aware of these phenomena and the supposed intentions behind them. In the end, I feel as if we were all given this ‘wokeness’ that is being described in this chapter and now the question is what we would do with this.

            It does seem rather daunting to be faced with this reality: as they say, ‘ignorance is bliss.’ and now that we are no longer as ignorant as we were concerning this issue, we are now given the choice of taking action against the issue or ignoring it altogether. It may seem rather tempting to just forget about everything we did in this class, just take the grade but discard the lesson, since fighting an institution such as the university or ideas such as the model minority myth can seem like such a difficult task but what we need to remember is that we are not alone. Even for those of us who are neither Asian nor Asian-American, we need to remember the importance of speaking up not just for ourselves, but for those around us. This reminds me of the prose First they came… by Neimöller that ends on the ominous line “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

           

            We all need to look out for one another, our neighbors, our loved ones, those strangers on the street, since they all make up our community. We need to speak up when we see injustices, we need to fight when we see discrimination, even if it is not to our own race, ethnicity or nationality. Perhaps if we look out for one another, then we can make the world a better place. My question now is, what can we do to speak out and take action against not only the injustices we learned in class but also the ones we see in our everyday lives

Valverde, C. K.-L., Dariotis, W. M.(2019). Conclusion: Academics Awaken: Power, Resistance, and Being Woke. In Fight the Tower. United States: Rutgers University Press

Northern Sun. (n.d.) Love you Neighbor Sign [Online Image]. Retrieved from Amazon