5/2 Kwon
The young people of AYPAL came together and acted
to combat unjust deportation of Cambodian immigrants. The unjustified
deportation acts were charged against incarcerated individuals with varying
degrees of crime, ideological/political refugees, and suspect terrorists. What
the youngsters did included, rallies, public protesting, public speeches, unite
together and elect representatives in order to stop deportations. These actions
reflect the way that young people from the excerpt “The Politics of Race:
Political Identity and the Struggle for Social Rights” by Bindi V. Shah fought
together with elderlies to win Laotian public services in the community. These
acts were also public displays of resistances that are counterexamples to the
ideas of everyday resistances from James Scott’s excerpt; whereas everyday
resistances avoid confrontations with authority, these young Cambodian took the
stage to public settings and directly challenged the hegemony of the State. The
unjust treatment of incarcerated, labeled, and deported people can also be seen
as the result of the control over epistemology. As Foucault has mentioned,
institutions that control information have the power to shape the way people
think and thus directly affect policy making. Thus, it was up to the protestors
to strike the good sense into people that Gramsci exclaimed, one must develop
such in order to make the fair judgements.
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