Stereotypes place undue pressure on minority groups

Suicidal thoughts are higher among Asian American college students than Caucasian students, said a report from the American Psychological Association. According to findings by the University of Washington, Asian American women born in the U.S. are more likely to contemplate and attempt suicide than any other ethnic group.

These numbers don’t make headlines. Instead, Asian Americans are consistently featured as the “model minority” in media and popular culture. This doesn’t seem overtly harmful, but that’s only if you don’t consider the implications of this stereotype on Asian Americans and their mental health.

When Asian Americans are stereotyped this way, they are held to extremely high standards: to be intelligent, excel in school and persevere without failure. This isn’t a stereotype reserved for the film and television industry. It is an actual belief people hold about Asian Americans.

This paints them as hard-wired, emotionless individuals who don’t have concerns outside of academic and financial success. What others don’t understand is that the pressure these stereotypes place on people can increase depression and anxiety.

Perhaps even more troubling, this model minority stereotype prevents Asian Americans from getting help for mental illnesses because they are automatically assumed not to have any problems. By promoting silence, we are dismissing a reality that many Asian Americans are living. Stereotypes dehumanize Asian Americans and strip them of their capacity to feel and express emotions.

For most Asian Americans, academic success is a priority; that isn’t false. The Pew Research Center reported that 49 percent of Asian Americans ages 25 and up have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 28 percent of the U.S. population. While this supports the “model minority” stereotype, it certainly doesn’t paint a full picture of why the stereotype persists.

Contrary to popular belief, Asians are not innately more intelligent. Rather, work ethic and the importance placed on education stem from cultural values that reflect a long, arduous history of lower and working-class Asians who immigrated to America for a better education and life.

These values are imbedded so deeply within Asian American culture that it affects not only the pressure individuals feel, but also how they respond to mental health issues.

Unfortunately, Asian American culture, which values privacy, doesn’t encourage individuals to speak up about mental illness. Often, when an individual has a mental illness, it isn’t even brought up even in the family. Instead it’s kept private, partly because of the shame associated with mental illness.

Because most Asian Americans don’t consider mental health problems valid illnesses, when an individual does have one, it isn’t seen as legitimate, and it isn’t held to the same level of seriousness as physical sickness.

To some extent, even physical well-being comes second to education in Asian culture.

This goes back to the fact that most Asian Americans and Americans don’t have a good understanding of mental illness. To most people, depression, despite being a disorder, seems no different from sadness.

Depression isn’t a temporary mood to “get over.” It’s persistent and impairs an individual from going about their normal routines. It is a legitimate illness, and it shouldn’t be dismissed.

When nearly an entire community refuses to acknowledge or discuss depression, this only contributes to the shame and ignorance surrounding mental health. Furthermore, doctors and counselors can’t treat and reach out to to a group if they don’t recognize what prevents them from seeking help in the first place.

Ignoring this issue and allowing the model minority stereotype to persist is detrimental to all groups, especially other minorities.

Other minority groups who don’t achieve the same level of academic or financial success are being held up to unrealistic standards. Culturally, not all groups have the same values, and it’s ridiculous to use one group’s supposed success as a standard without understanding the cultural and social factors and the detrimental consequences of that success.

Written by: Jeanette Yue –– jyyue@ucdavis.edu

Numbers show Davis is a model for equitable enrollment practices

A fresh school year has brought a new wave of discussion on the University of California’s enrollment figures. This year’s class is the most diverse in UC history. But it’s time for me to be the bad guy and bring the conversation back to a hot button issue of recent years: the controversy surrounding increasing nonresident enrollment. It’s important to avoid demonizing nonresidents in this discussion. Recognizing universities which have the best system for both residents and nonresidents is imperative.

Let’s look at some data from my home state of Arizona and compare its public university system to California’s. California has 32 public universities available to undergraduates and Arizona has three. For every 1.2 million California residents there is a public university, whereas in Arizona the number bends upwards to one public university for every 2 million residents.

Based on these numbers, it appears as if Californians have less of a “squeeze” for public university placement than Arizona does.

But there’s a caveat with these statistics — they don’t account for differences in the demand for public education, and therefore the numbers don’t tell the whole story. To account for this, we must examine general enrollment trends for Californians in concert with statewide population statistics for college age individuals.

There was a 16 percent increase in the number of Californians aged 20 to 24 from 2000 to 2010. Over the same time period, there was a 21 percent increase in enrollment of Californians at UC Davis; there was actually a greater number of Californians enrolled at Davis than statewide demographic trends would indicate.

Let’s examine more recent years. From 2010 to 2014, there was an estimated four percent increase in the number of Californians aged 20 to 24. During the same time period UC Davis saw a five percent increase in Californian enrollment. UC Davis has not been shorting Californians at all; on the contrary, Davis has been a model for equitable enrollment practices.

The UC system as a whole experienced more pronounced enrollment figures for Californians compared to the statewide 20 to 24 age-range statistics from 2000 to 2010. During these years the UC system saw a 27 percent increase in Californian enrollment as a whole. But enrollment fell flat between 2010 and 2014. During that time period, enrollment figures for California residents at UCs overall remained stagnant, despite the four percent increase in Californians aged 20- to 24 in the same window.

The only campuses which saw a comparable increase in Californian enrollment from 2010 to 2014 were Davis and Merced. Berkeley and San Diego saw a substantial decrease in Californian enrollment, while the rest remained more or less stagnant.

Criticism may be warranted, but it should be focused in the right direction. The blame for stagnating enrollment should not be cast on nonresidents. Instead, certain schools should be charged with failing to work hard enough to ensure enrollment figures reflect demographic changes.

Nonresident enrollment has increased substantially in the UC system. This in and of itself should not be a problem: more nonresidents enable diversity of thought and enrich college campuses with cultural awareness somewhat akin to studying abroad. (In a perfect world this practice would exist because of its potential social benefits and not for monetary reasons, but that’s a whole different ballgame.)

The million-dollar question is whether nonresident student growth spells doom for California residents. The answer is nuanced. Data from California reveals a gap between general population trends and enrollment for residents. However, some schools like Davis can move the numbers higher in both camps at the expense of none.

This is the ideal paradigm. Understanding what works at the university level is paramount to fixing any perceived injustice in enrollment. As for the student perspective, I implore the following: consider the experiences of nonresidents before jumping on the anti-nonresident bandwagon.

Ask whether you would feel comfortable facing ever-increasing backlash against your origin. Reflect on the power of acceptance and the impacts of diversity. Nonresidents are people too.

Written by: Nick Irvin — ntirvin@ucdavis.edu

Did you know in France it’s illegal to throw away food past its “best by” date? Unsold products from grocery stores are sent to food banks, and the repurposed food generates over 10 million meals for those suffering from food instability.

In America, expired food goes to the dumpster. The United States produces the highest amount of food waste in the world. This wasted food includes food that is expired, overstocked or considered too “ugly” to sell. Today, we produce enough food to feed the entire population, yet millions do not receive enough food to lead a healthy lifestyle. In the U.S. alone, one in eight people are going hungry.

The world population grows by more than 200,000 people per day. Most of this growth comes from developing regions like Asia and Africa. Whereas the United States underwent its industrial revolution around 1760 to 1840, many underprivileged regions have only in the last few decades started to achieve the same level of manufacturing and production.

With increasing industrialization, countries also experience population booms, leading to improved diets and a higher demand for food. This includes meat-based products, which are considered luxuries.

In order to keep up with the burgeoning world population, we will need to produce twice as much food as we do today to feed the expected 9 billion that will populate the Earth by 2050. We will need to generate twice the amount of calories on the same amount of land in order to preserve our ecosystems.

Which such a large population on the horizon, we need to take a long, hard look at the way we grow food today. As it stands, we do not have the means or resources to grow enough food to feed that many people if we keep using our current systems.

Think of it this way: about 25 percent of Earth is land, and only half of that land is available for us to live on. And we only use about nine percent of land for cities, neighborhoods and factories. This leaves us with only a little over three percent of the entire planet to grow food and only on the top three feet of soil.

With our resources so severely limited, how can we expect to feed ourselves and future generations without completely destroying our planet? Consider this: between now and the end of the century, we’ll have to produce more food than we’ve ever grown in the last 10,000 years combined.

Sustainable agriculture and livestock agriculture, as two of the fastest-growing research fields today, have been trying to keep up with increasing food demands. Scientists and professors all over the globe, including at UC Davis, are working to discover more sustainable methods of growing food.

For example, Dr. Ermias Kebreab, of the animal science department, works to measure the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to build mathematical models to search for potential solutions in animal husbandry and manure and soil management practices. His models have been used in New Zealand, the United States, Europe and Australia in order to predict the emission output in those countries.

Another professor at UC Davis, Dr. Frank M. Mitloehner, specializes in designing “environmentally benign livestock systems” –– or the effects of animal husbandry on the environment and vice versa.

He also focuses on air quality and the impacts of livestock emissions on the environment and on animal welfare and health. By reducing the impact these emissions have on animals, their overall production performance will improve, meaning more food for consumers at a lower environmental cost, Dr. Mitloehner has found.

The possibilities are endless and the research is ongoing. Now it’s up to consumers to make a change. It’s time to start reading and educating ourselves about where our food comes from and how it’s grown.

The work done by researchers like Dr. Kebreab and Dr. Mitloehner will help create a greener food production system critical for facing the 2050 challenge in a responsible way.

When we start taking charge of how we eat food, we waste less, we use our resources better and fewer people go hungry.

Written by: Alice Rocha –– asrocha@ucdavis.edu