Asian Americans students are guilty of “colorblind racism” according to a college professor.
Campus Reform reports that Soo Ah Kwon, a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, made the comments in the recent issue of Race, Ethnicity, and Education.
“We problematize this schema not only because it places undue responsibility upon Asian American students but [because] it also renders the experiences of racial marginalization and discrimination invisible for international and domestic racial minority students,” writes Kwon.
“In other words, efforts to mitigate racial difference is understood and marked as belonging to non-white students in a colorblind society,” Kwon added.
Kwon and her team interviewed students at Midwestern University, paying particular attention to members of Asian American cultural clubs.
Whilst she notes that “Asian American students and their organizations took on the responsibility of integrating Asian international students on campus,” Kwon refutes that “this institutional arrangement reflects the university’s management of difference by affirming the value of diversity…while overlooking the larger patterns of racial segregation on campus, and the marginalization of racial minority students, both domestic and international.”
The professor discovered that international students chose to segregate but doubted if these choices are based on “past historical injustices” and “contemporary racism under normative whiteness.”
One student named Sam said he had an “inability to make friends beyond his fellow circle of Asian Americans.” Kwon suggests the issue was caused by “forms of racial discrimination.”
Kwon concludes that students’ passivity in making friends beyond their circles reinforces “colorblind racism”, which occurs when “contemporary racial inequality is reproduced through ideologies, practices, and policies that support nonracial dynamics”.
Failure to consider the involvement of race in these issues ignores the “structures of power that privileges whiteness and white supremacy.”
Nonetheless, Kwon states that addressing the issue “must be an institutional responsibility that takes serious stock of racism and marginalization of domestic minority and international students on campus”.
SOURCE: Campus Reform
