Bigotry In Stacey Lee's Outrun The Moon

Chapter six examines the anti-Chinese sentiment with the emerging class antagonism and turmoil between white capitalists and workers. The unwelcomed arrival of Chinese immigrants brought along their own social organizations such as the huiguan, fongs, and tongs. These types of social organizations secured areas of employment and housing for Chinese immigrants in California. This social structure that was unknown to Anglos led them to also categorize Chinese on the same level as Indians by depicting them as lustful heathens whom were out to taint innocent white women. These images were also perpetuated onto Chinese women, thus, also sexualizing them as all prostitutes.

Major Issues Raised and what is the case about The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) was integrated in 1971 by the federal courts. Nearly 3,000 students with Chinese lineage attended the district’s schools. Of the nearly 3,000 students, approximately 1,800 weren’t proficient in English, or they didn’t receive additional remediation regarding their deficient English language skills. The non-English speaking students filed a class action lawsuit against the SFUSD claiming they weren’t provided with equal educational opportunities. In addition, they claimed they were being denied their Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Groves High School has a set of rules that set a certain standard for its students. In the book Tangled Threads: A Hmong Girl Story by Pegi Deitz Shea and If you come softly by Jacqueline Woodson both sets of characters go through similar situations. In Tangled Threads, main character, Mai Yang is deported to the U.S from a refugee camp in Thailand, after the devastating war in her hometown Laoz. Once she finally gets to America after a agonizing 10 years she learns to deal with the newly found American customs but still keep in touch with her Hmong roots. In If you come softly, main characters Elie and Miah, juggle the obstacles and society’s opinion on being an interracial couple in the 1990’s.

With the rise of student resistance, Chicana and Chicano students in East Los Angeles schools were motivated by a desire to create just and equitable learning environments. However, the school resistance of Chicana and Chicano students is often marred by narratives, such as the one in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the students’ goal was to incite chaos and violence without acknowledging that the walkouts were a response to unequal access to education and omission of Chicano history and culture in their school curriculum. In the Los Angeles Times article, “Start of a Revolution?: ‘Brown Power’ Unity Seen Behind School Disorders,” the author, Dial Torgerson includes the voices of students at the foreground of the Chicano movement, but fails to include that their acts of resistance were more than a rise of militancy. Torgerson recognizes the walkouts as acts of “Mass Militancy” and “Scenes of Disorder” sparked by student rebellion, and by doing so he is ignoring the role police played in executing violence against students. More importantly, Torgerson marginalizes the experiences of Mexican-American students when he questions the validity of students’ complaint about facing discrimination at the academic level (“Is there any significance to students’ complaints that Mexican-Americans are being pushed into shop courses, and

Julie also faced discrimination from some of her teachers, who would overlook her academic achievements and favor white students. Her family faced discrimination from the broader community and Wang further describes how they are perceived differently as a minority. When describing their neighborhood, Julie says, “It reminded me of the area where we first lived when we arrived in America, the place that taught me that we were chinks who would be attacked by dogs as their owner stood by, laughing.” (226). They struggled to find housing and jobs and were often subjected to racist remarks and harassment.

After my arrival, I was placed in a bilingual high school located in midtown Manhattan. My high school was one of the four schools in the building; each floor had its own school. The schools were divided as follow: the first floor; special Ed, second floor; culinary arts (black students), third floor; native English speakers (mostly white students), and fourth floor; bilingual school for newcomer immigrants (Hispanics). The dynamics of segregation experienced in my high school reflects to the reality that many Americans lived in the era of “Separate but equal.” Sadly, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the United States schools continued to be segregated.

Ultimately, ethnic studies promote American ideals, create identity, and only create contempt when being constrained from these courses. Ethnic studies should be implemented in schools, because they promote American ideals of diversity, inclusion, and freedom. In a place like America, where diversity is supposed to be the building block of our nation, one would think that different ethnic groups would have the right to study their own identity. Students question this in the film and make claims such as, “Education is so against me that they don’t want me.” Evidently, with the threat of abolishing ethnic studies courses, students feel a lack of inclusion, which defies American values.

Prejudice has been an ingrained part of society since ancient history, whether based on race, religion, sex, economic status, or any number of other dividing factors between groups of people. It has left marks throughout human history in everything from slavery to the Holocaust to the modern wage gap. As a result, works of literature are frequently centered around how prejudice affects one character or group of people. The book series The Lunar Chronicles is a prime example of this, as it focuses on a young girl named Cinder who is discriminated against because of her status as a cyborg. The novel is set several hundred years into a dystopian future, in which cyborgs are treated as second class citizens.

In the United States, using the term “model minority” to describe Asian Americans does not negate the fact that they are still a minority who deal with the same hardships and discrimination as other minorities. Issues such as these are undeniably in the school systems that are inhabited by large numbers of these students with Asian backgrounds. They are exemplified by the bipolar historical treatment of Asian Americans, the numbers that matter in education today, and in the problems created and overcome by the people that face them. Sifting through the dark and difficult history leads to the light on the other side of a tunnel where there can be found methods and solutions to create success for the Asian American people. The first thing to

Ideally schools would provide equal education and opportunities for all children, but in reality racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of discrimination still exist, albeit more hidden, in our schools today. Rather than stressing academic enrichment, the elementary schools that Chicanas/os attend to focus on academic remediation and a deceleration of the curriculum. The primary curriculum itself generally excludes or minimizes Chicana/o experiences, while also reinforcing

America’s racist ideals were seeded way before the bombing of pearl harbor. Acts like the Naturalization Act of 1870, Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Immigration Act of 1924 grew racism towards Asians. (Notes). This would lead to the sentiment that Japanese people did not belong in America. In document 9, this is supported with the statement “The Chinese and Japanese are not bona fide citizens.”

Bigotry: Applying the Sociological Imagination Bigotry. What is it? It is when someone is “stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own” (dictionary.com).

Segregation of Mexican Americans from the dominant Anglo race has been around for many years. Since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Mexican Americans have been treated like a second-class race facing racism and segregation. As a result, segregation in the education system affected Mexican American children. An increasing number of Mexican Americans across California led to an increase of Mexican children enrolling in schools. Author David James Gonzales (2017), explores the degrading school facilities Mexican students were assigned to.

Bob Vylan’s album We Live Here speaks on a pattern of systematic racism in the UK that is paralled within the US. The album as a whole provides a lens into life in Britain as a Black person. He displays this through his lyrics on various tracks, most prominent in, “We Live Here”, and “Pulled Pork”. Within each of these songs, Vylan connects listeners by identifying the struggles of systematic racism exhibited by casual racism, and police brutality. These themes can be connected to the course reading of Living While Black by PR Lockhart.

Without a doubt racism still has an influence in the education system. Students in school today are still harmed by prejudice in the system and this interview is verification for those instances. My interviewee and I attended the same elementary and high school together. We shared