Monthly Archives: June 2010

* – In response to Out-of-Date by IWriteAsIWrite.  Thanks to The Greatest for pointing this out.

The beauty of the Web is exchange; that there is no need for name-calling or caustic responses.  While the author may have misspelled my thinly-disguised pseudonym, I’d like to say that I stand corrected on the many flaws he or she did point out in my previous entry, but in many ways, I do stand my ground.

I do agree, if only that I myself am founded in the same perspective that I try my best to balance out.  Yet my bone of contention, as the author points out, remains the same: decolonization.  The anecdote I started the entry with can be attested to by Filipino schoolchildren.  Race is still pervasive.  Those of us who have had the benefit of learning things at a higher level may know that race does not exist but culture does, but not to those who sit in 60-students-to-a-teacher classrooms.

By “decolonization,” I do not mean flinging ourselves back to 1520 and back.  History can only move forward, and we cannot bring the datus and the barangays as they existed, and we certainly cannot demolish the condominiums of Makati to give way to huts near the Pasig River.  To decolonize does not mean to redact or revert: it means to rediscover. To decolonize does not mean to deny, but to dispel.  To decolonize does not mean to destroy the past.  To decolonize means to undo the fabric of colonization, and to use the threads of everything – good, bad, and ugly – to create our magic carpet to a whole new world (doh).

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When I was in grade school, my Sibika teachers taught me that very familiar lesson on the “Filipino race” on United Nations Week.  I was the palest kid in class, so I wore the suit and tie and represented the United States.  The darkest kid in class represented some African country, and there was always someone dressed in Filipiñana.  We were all called to the front, and ‘Tcher started the lesson:

When you mix white blood (pointing to me) and black blood (pointing to my classmate) together, you will get… (the class recites, “Filipino!”).

We started sampling foods in the school potluck, which pretty much reinforced the day’s lesson.  Dessert was very poignant: Halo-halo is a mixture of different ingredients from all over the world to create a Filipino dessert.

Taking up Anthropology in college was a scholarly adaptation of United Nations Week, without global cosplay and potluck buffet but with the addition of thick readings, but it still reinforced the notion of “mixtures.”  H. Otley Beyer, for example, defined two weeks of migratory patterns on a class one semester.  Waves of migration, as well as colonization, affirmed the mathematics of bloodline: black + white = brown.  Drawing pedigree charts would trace your lineage to anything but a “Filipino race,” but affirms the family story of coming from China and Spain, unearthing some possibility of a “dark” ancestor being married – or raped – by a “white” colonizer.

The cosmetics aisles of the supermarket are filled with shelves of whitening soaps, whitening lotions, and everything else to make you “white.”  There is a methodical detaching from “brown” that goes beyond skin care: the voluminous rants and raves of “Only in the Philippines,” and “Kasi naman ang Pinoy.” It’s a kind of bleaching that goes beyond papaya soap, like adapting a “conventional” name and place when you work in a call center, for example.  Or to leave the Philippines is to “seek greener pastures,” no longer pakikipagsapalaran. A word that, in itself, connotes poverty, promdi, and degradation.

Every undertone and overtone of it is racist: from the Sibika classes to the Anthro lectures, from glutathione creams to kutis-mayaman billboards in EDSA.  Or adjusting color and hue in Photoshop pictures to make one less brown than he or she should be.  It is the 21st century rebuilding – and reaffirming – of indio.

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