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Nap Time!!!

Friday, September 15, 2006
Unity!

Cameron must be overjoyed. Kim Dan and Jude Dizon explain why Asians should sacrifice their success for blacks and Latinos.
It is not accurate to place a vague and arbitrary label on an entire continent's worth of diverse ethnic groups. The overgeneralization of Asian Americans being nearly half of the campus population blankets the unique issues and struggles of multiple Asian ethnic groups, leaving them unaddressed and unresolved.
But...
After Proposition 209 was implemented, eliminating race and gender as factors in admissions, the freshmen representation of Latinos at UC Berkeley dropped 49 percent in 1998, while African Americans decreased by 43 percent. The misleading increase of Asian Americans on campus marginalizes the underrepresented subgroups hidden under the pan-Asian category.
African-American, however, is not a vague and arbitrary label on an entire continent's worth of ethnic groups. Neither is Latino. Right.
With race-conscious policies, the struggle is not just that of Asian Americans, but of every racial and ethnic group. Asian Americans and all oppressed and marginalized people must work together to ensure collective success.
We are the Borg. Don't succeed. You can only succeed as a collective. You are not an individual. Only white people get to be individuals.

posted by Beetle Aurora Drake 9/15/2006 11:16:00 AM #
Comments (2)
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Comments:
To clarify: African-American refers to a people with ancestors from the CONTINENT of Africa, and Latino hardly referst to one ethnic group (Mexican, Puerto Rican, etc).

Furthermore, Asian Americans are not successful in the employment sector. A white college graduate earns more than an Asian college graduate with equal training/knowledge in the same field. Also, Asian Americans face a glass ceiling (as do other minorities and women) when it comes to job promotions and often find that they do not rise up the corporate ladder, even when they are very qualified. In fact, Asian Americans with more years of schooling have a lower return in terms of income in comparison to a white individual with less years of schooling.

What you failed to see from the article is that Asian Americans are being subsumed under a blanket category imposed on them by the dominant, hegemonic culture of America, which doesn't allow for diversity and uniqueness among the individual Asian ethnic groups.

Not all Asian groups come even close to the myth of the model minority, and for people to assume so is dangerous. So what sacrifice of success are you referring to?

Americans have rallied together many a time to fight for the rights they feel they deserve that the government is not giving them--from the American Revolution to the Woman's right to vote to Free Speech. Why should the collective strength of minorities coming together be any different?
 
Because Asians have nothing to gain from it. I don't see how not getting a degree is going to help them, even if they do face challenges when they get one.

I don't know how lame an asian culture has to be to be utterly destroyed by a vague category on college applications. It's not the job of everyone else in the country to help define your culture.
 
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