4/25 Shah

           The excerpt “The Politics of Race: Political Identity and the Struggle for Social Rights” by Bindi V. Shah discusses the struggles of mono-linguistic nature of local government, in which case, at Contra Costa County. The incident involved an explosion happening at a local Chevron station, which lead to sirens going off and warnings being sent out on radio and television stations. The problem was, these alerts were only in English, which many Laotians who lived in the city were unable to understand. Thus, the elderly who stayed at home only saw dark smoke and was worried to death about it. On top of that, some students were let out of school instead of following instructions by the police to stay in the school/classrooms to avoid toxic air. This incident affected both young and old, thus it lead to an upset in the community that brought Chevron to apologize, and city council to agree to 4 demands to incorporate better safety measures for future incidents and multilingual alert systems. The movements included mostly young people, with some elderly; with confidence in their early victory, they pushed for another agenda to privatize danger alert responsibilities to better serve their own communities. I believe this relates to the concept of epistemology that we discussed in class; in which the ones in power may not always be serving the whole in their purpose. Thus, it was up to the minorities to rise up and take control of what is good for them. This is counter to James Scott’s idea of everyday resistances though, since the Laotian community directly took their case to the city council. This is a rare case of revolution, and luckily did not backfire the way Scott described it in his excerpt.