Reading through Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia, one can clearly see the thoughts and ideas that the author is trying to provoke out of the reader. The author brings up a lot of questions as to what different words mean in the context of race and its current state. Such questions include the mentioning of what a minority is and who applies to that grouping, or what it means to be a model minority and why it is not necessarily a good thing. I think that the author is trying to provoke the reader into thinking more deeply about the terminology used in racial groupings and further applies it to the identity of Asians. Looking back at our presentation, I think this idea helped frame a lot of what we talked about and why the Asian American experience is negated through the language we use going into these conversations. 

Looking at our presentation, I would say we framed the conversation very well and were able to contextualize the geography of the area as well as give more insights as to how racial compositions change because I live in the general area of where the book takes place. This helped further explain the racial dynamics of the Bay Area and how they apply to Mission San Jose High School. Defining what a minority is with the class helped start the conversation on how it is defined among various groups. This further opened the discussion to the application of the book’s contents. We were then able to talk about the idea of a model minority and the implications of being a model minority. We found that taking on the model minority status takes away from the experience of the group taking it on as well as makes life harder for those groups who are not in the model minority group. An interesting point brought up in class was on who gets to decide the status of these groups. It was generally agreed upon that white people are the ones who get to make these classifications. Since they are the ones in a position of power, they can decide who is in what group and if it will be racialized such as with religion. 

We then examined a lot of the media portrayal of Asians and how they are constantly set up as being a model minority and nearing in on being white. Looking at various article titles, it becomes clear that major publishers also recognize how Asians are ‘becoming white’ in America. This idea also takes away from the experiences Asians have had in the US because they had to work hard to get to where they currently are. Them being a model minority also keeps other groups in a negative light because if Asians are the model minority, then it assumes that other groups such as African Americans and Hispanics are just not a ‘good’ minority. 

We then looked at schooling systems and their connection with Asian Americans because of the differences in prioritization between Asians and white people. Asians tend to prioritize more STEM fields in their studies, whereas white people want a more ‘well-rounded’ and ‘balanced’ education. As seen with Mission San Jose, this difference in where people want to focus their academics causes a different type of white flight where the white people of the area leave because of the rigor of the work in the primarily Asian schools. This connection was interesting because of the high amount of white people leaving and using the rigor as another way to move out. This brings up the question of when it is valid for white people to leave an area without it being considered white flight. Next, I enjoyed connecting what we read with the statistics of Bowdoin’s racial makeup and how people may think the future of Bowdoin will look like. 

After class, I was mostly left thinking about what it means to be a model minority and what if some other race was considered the model minority. I was wondering if we would see a difference in the way races see themselves if some other race such as Hispanics were the model minority. Would we see a change in the dynamic of the standard people hold themselves to? I was also left to think about the implications of the white flight in Fremont considering it is an area so close to me. Would some issue like the rigor of schools also bring up other issues of self-segregation among neighborhoods? Although the focus of the book was mostly on schools, it brings up many interesting questions on separate issues. 

The assigned readings from Patrick Sharkey’s piece “Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality” are very telling in the names of the chapters on their own: “The Inheritance of the Ghetto,” “Neighborhoods and the Transmission of Racial Inequality,” and “The Cross-Generational Legacy of Urban Disadvantage.” The week of these readings we examined exactly what these title touch on. Putting it in a broader sense, we talked about the intergenerational transmission of poverty among African Americans. We also examined the difficulty people of color have in trying to hold on to their economic upward mobility throughout generations, whereas white people can hold on to it, and if they happen to go down, it is usually only for one generation. 

Further going into our presentation, I thought it was interesting to see what came to people’s minds when we started with a word association activity on a few images we searched with terms such as “white ghetto,” “black ghetto,” and “family in suburbs.” Although Ayana and I thought that people may not really share what came to mind when they saw the images, I thought the activity went well and people were contributing to the conversation. Something that did surprise me about that activity was where the focus lay for many students. For example, for the picture of a “black ghetto,” there was a lot of debate on what city the picture was from. Next, we talked about the portrayal of black people in the ghetto because Sharkey mentions the association of welfare, incarceration, killing, and other ‘ghetto’ things with black people because of the media. We talked about the difference in between blacks and whites and how white people usually get the upper hand in their cases. 

Because we had technical difficulties, we did not get to show everything we would have liked to and in the order we wanted to, but we were able to get a video playing that touched on redlining and we connected it to the week’s readings. Redlining only contributes and perpetuates a lot of the troubles African Americans have in keeping their upward mobility because the practice would mark neighborhoods as unsafe to give someone a loan there, and the people in the redlined areas were typically African American. Although we were not able to show some of the statistics on the perception of the upper, middle, and lower classes, I think we were able to effectively communicate the difficulty of upward mobility for many African American people and how economic status is only transmitted across generations when it has to do with staying in poverty. We also found connections between the current readings and past ones such as “The Iconic Ghetto” and “Golden Valley.” Having all these connections showed us the interconnectedness of different ideas and how they all can communicate a similar idea or apply to each other. The connections to the past pieces also brought up important questions on the perception of poverty and how it would connect to an iconic ghetto person or an impoverished white person. 

Leaving the discussion, I started to ponder about some of the things we presented and that people say and one of the first questions that came to mind had to do with the intergenerational effects of poverty: if it is so difficult to stay up when you improve your way of living, how will that apply to many of my friends and myself back home? It also made me think about how this cycle can be broken and if it is too soon to tell if this will be an elongated trend for the future. Another question that was raised during discussion was about who’s responsibility it is to integrate white people and people of color. I think it is somewhat paradoxical because if white people must take charge, it brings up future issues of gentrification and such. If people of color must take charge, it brings greater issues of being uncomfortable and having to fix the issues that white people first made.