Day: September 10, 2020

Hi, all! I found a link to a really interesting article that talked about a famous American soldier, David Fagen, who abandoned his troops in the Philippine-American War and actively supported Filipino liberation. I learned of this story through a friend and decided to check it out.

It was interesting hearing how race has been used as justification from Americans to deny people’s rights and freedoms. What made this article and story so unique is the parallel between the dawn of Jim Crow and the anti-Asian sentiment that the United States had at this time. Most of the time, we only talk about Black and White relations within the United States and it is interesting to hear of the ways that the US has intentionally limited knowledge on Asian discrimination (Japanese internment, immigration, etcetera) to perpetuate the model minority ideology.  I recommend you all to read the article! It isn’t portrayed as a sob story or one of malice, but was rather objective and showed Fagen’s humanity which I appreciated.

The 19th-Century African-American Soldier Who Fought for Filipino Liberation

I read something this past summer that I thought resonated with the part of The Karma of Brown Folk where Prashad talks about how the desi population is placed at a racial ambivalence within the American social hierarchy. In that work, We Will Not Be Used: Are Asian Americans the Racial Bourgeoisie?, Mari Matsuda discusses how Asian Americans are encouraged to strive for unattainable “whiteness.”  The interactions between Asian Americans and other people of color are basically divided into two directions: the pursuit of that whiteness which places Asian Americans on the model minority pedestal and the rejection of it. The system is designed to pit people of color against each other in order to provide the norm a level of defense against an organized pushback.

One of the quotes that really resonates with me from Matsuda’s writing is: “The success [of Asian Americans] that is our pride is not to be given over as a weapon to use against other struggling communities.” The rhetoric of the model minority myth is so damaging to the all of our society and as an Asian American, being used as a tool to carry out the oppression of other minorities is difficult to sit with. Yet I understand my privilege in this racial hierarchy and the necessity to challenge and dismantle it.

Citations & Interesting Readings:

Matsuda, Mari. “We Will Not Be Used: Are Asian Americans the Racial Bourgeoisie?” In Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader, edited by Wu Jean Yu-wen Shen and Chen Thomas C., 558-64. Rutgers University Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzn3s.32.

Kim, Claire Jean, and Taeku Lee. “Interracial Politics: Asian Americans and Other Communities of Color.” PS: Political Science and Politics 34, no. 3 (2001): 631-37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1353551.