An application of Young’s conceptualization of cultural imperialism to Southeast Asian refugees and the school-to-deportation pipeline

• In Event: Conceptualizing Iris Young’s (1990) “Five Faces of Oppression” to protest violence in education against humans and animals

Proposal

Dillard (2018) describes the school-to-deportation pipeline as a channel whereby immigrant, refugee, and undocumented students are forced to interact with law enforcement and funneled into a punitive detention, incarceration, and deportation system. Contextualizing the school-to-deportation pipeline affecting the Southeast Asian (SEA) refugee community is accomplished by applying Iris Young’s (1990) conceptualization of cultural imperialism to historical events, race and class ideologies, and crime and immigration laws. Young (1990) defines cultural imperialism as a sub-group’s experience of “how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other” (p. 66). Regarding the pervasive invisibility and othering of the SEA refugee community in the United States, it is important to note that SEA refugees were forcibly displaced from their prior countries due to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. However, unjust race and class ideologies tracing back to relations between Native Tribes in North America and colonists (Vaught et al., 2022) continue to influence the disproportionate disciplining of colored youth in schools as well as crime and immigration laws that contribute to the siphoning of SEA refugee community members into the school-to-deportation pipeline.

The cultural imperialism pertaining to SEA refugees and their families “involves the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm” (Young, 1990, p. 66). When white settlers took possession of lands inhabited by indigenous Tribal Nations in the U.S. colonists established their beliefs, behaviors, and power as norms and “pawn[ed] Nativeness for a carceral assimilationist project—assimilation into the criminal” (Vaught et al., 2022, p. 53). This is more clearly understood through Young’s (1990) explanation that as claims of universality by the dominant group are challenged when encountering other groups the “dominant group reinforces its position by bringing the other groups under the measure of its dominant norms. Consequently, the difference [identified between the U.S.’ white-centric society and communities of color] becomes reconstructed largely as deviance and inferiority” (p. 66). This is confirmed by multiple studies (e.g., Lee, 2002; Uyeda, 2021; Verma et al., 2017) that highlight the hyper-criminalization of SEA students. Furthermore, the presence of school resource officers who are deputized by Homeland Security (Geron & Levinson, 2018) and the usage of school records in immigration and deportation hearings (The National Immigration Law Center, 2021) unfairly complicate the citizenship process for SEA refugee community members.

This paper analyzes how cultural imperialism, immigration factors, schools, and law enforcement entangle SEA community members in the school-to-deportation pipeline and offers suggestions for next steps.

Author

• Rochelle Lauta Zuniga, Florida International University