Feeling voiceless in America

I don’t know if it’s just me having a personally bad experience with speaking my mind in American society, but I feel that, as an Asian American especially, my thoughts are sort of pushed aside and do not count in many social situations. If you look at the politicians in this country, for instance, the overwhelming majority are composed of caucasian and African American descent despite Asian Americans having a healthy representation at the Ivy League institutions, which are feeder schools for American politics. The question becomes: where are all these Asians headed after a successful college stint? Are they all just destined for high paying professions that away from the public eye? I don’t know the answer to that.

In medical school, I did feel that certain people in positions of power did not like it when I spoke up. They’d rather prefer the docile Asian stereotype. I went to school in a predominantly white area in a very segregated city of Chicago, and, mind you, some these people were not just of caucasian descent–some were minorities themselves. I don’t know how I feel about that experience. If I were to do it again, I probably would’ve taken some more time off to bolster my medical school application and tried to attend a school that is a bit more diverse in an area probably a bit closer to home. In retrospect, I was just a bit inexperienced as a recent immigrant in choosing the correct institution for medical school. I won’t let that happen again.

But back to this idea of feeling voiceless in America. It’s sort of easy to feel that way especially with the development and use of social media. It’s true that there are multiple influencers who have made it big on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. I don’t know if I want to be one of them given the type of exposure that they receive. However, for some medical influencers, that exposure in the public eye could be a beneficial thing if they, say, have a private practice. This is sort of why I continue to use social media as a form of free advertising for my upcoming venture in architecture. Yet, being an average person with sub-1000 followers, it does sort of feel like you don’t really have a platform to communicate messages to the world. Maybe this feeling of voicelessness is a relatively common one for the average person: I think it is.