Faculty Writing: Model Minorities and Education as “Product”

In Dilettante Army, Nara Roberta Silva discusses the rhetorical division of “good” immigrants and “bad”—a rhetoric employed to conceal the fact that an immigrant’s presence ”is only accepted when it is ‘of value.’” Value, moreover, is constitutive of race: “Social, economic, and political forces shape social categories and infuse them with certain meanings. Over time, groups may be racialized and given a lower status within society through a combination of socioeconomic and political structures, everyday practices, and ideological constructs—all of which are geographically and historically situated.” 

For The Nation, R.H. Lossin explains the austerity measures being implemented against City University of New York (CUNY) and the necessity of fighting back by strike. “The Ivy League will return to campus when this is over, but CUNY and other public universities that serve populations who society has deemed undeserving of anything but the bare minimum are going to need to fight for their existence. Believing that the worst outcome is inevitable is cynical. But thinking that this will be solved through the polite pressure of a petition is naïve. Militant collective action is both hopeful and our only hope.”