BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol I, No. 10
Nov 10, 2004
social criticisms by
Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra III
Love In The
Time of Racism
EVERY NOW AND THEN racism brings itself to
the table at certain unguarded, or what one possibly assumes to be
unguarded, moments. A government official at the helm of our
government’s Tourism Department (who heretofore was a controversial
Agrarian Reform Department secretary) recently blurted out what may have
been an attempt to sound patriotic and missionary and witty, to wit, that
we as Filipinos must not allow ourselves to be below par our Chinese
brethren who happen to have “smaller eyes”. A publisher-editor of a
magazine of Chinese-Filipino origin walked out of the affair, and a
plethora of short-lived rants from Filipino-American writers in the
audience ensued.
However, it behooves us as critics of ourselves
to consider the reality that racism is part of our daily bread and breath,
a minute to our every hour, and a compendium of races might be involved in
each of our individual hatreds. Our own rage against the unguardedly
out-blurted racism of another might in fact reveal a racism we have
towards ourselves. In intelligently self-criticizing our anger, for
example, we might check what we have believed to be a Filipino mark of
emotionalism (which emotionalism, from a higher view, might not exactly be
exclusive to us, given
examples of some same behavior abroad). Anti-racism might also be a form
of racism itself, allowing only others to deserve the criticism but us who
may possess the more critical racism. So much anti-racist protestations
would derive from Chinese-Filipinos who at the same time would carry loads
of prejudice against a race I may call Capital-less Workers and who would
disinherit a daughter for marrying an employee (not that the Malay
Filipino wealthy would be devoid of this attitude).
A race could be a category of skin color, within which would be sub-categories towards which other sub-categories therein will have their own racist prejudice (e.g. a Black American might consider himself superior to a Nigerian; a Japanese might regard Koreans a weaker Oriental set). A race could also be a nation: the Islamic nation, the Jewish nation, the anti-choice Christian fundamentalist nation, the gay nation, the communist internationalist jet set, and so on. Each of which loudly cry of oppression while failing to consider the racism within its own compassions. So much has been written and filmed about the demon in the figure of Adolph Hitler as a reactionary, for example, nothing loudly heard about the stimuli of this hatred in early 20th-century Germany that laid out public support for Nazism. A number of Jews would automatically label anti-Semitic even simple self-criticalities from among Jews themselves, which behavior would explain a failure to consider Jewish paranoia and oppressions against the Palestinian suffering; a number of Palestinians might also find it difficult to accept Israeli right to occupy what is now Israel (sans Gaza and West Bank), in turn offering their racist refusal to compromise with another race or religion.
I wonder how Filipino-Americans in general regard their poorer
compatriots in the archipelago, given the much-observed human proclivity
to feel topping about one’s accumulated wealth and/or fame outside
one’s village’s laughing contentment that one presumably left. Isn’t
condescension a form of racism? Manila comedy continues to hang the
Visayan accent while regarding the superiority of Indian and Singaporean
English which might actually be worse by the standards of the comedy and
its
preferred twang. It would also not be hard to find an inward racism in a Filipino who grew up
loving Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Wolfgang Petersen, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton,
or Zhang Yimou, ashamed to collect DVDs of Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Tikoy
Aguiluz, Jeffrey Jeturian, Mario O’Hara, or even Lino Brocka films. Many
a Filipino music collector would see Gary Granada a much lower giant
compared to Neil
Young, and it wouldn’t be because of the height. We even have this
universal racism against the living human race as a whole, rewarding many
of our neighbors’ achievements only posthumously. We also divide people
into generations, as though each generation is a disgusting separate
nation. It would not be hard to find 90s rock music fans guffawing at someone
who is still into his Paul Weller’s, and if you think this is making
banal or "pop" out of the subject at issue, one might perhaps to witness the
violence raked by such conflicts as between the hip-hop nation and metal
rock nation in Manila.
But to stick to our issue of racism towards the Chinese-Filipino, we can examine the possible roots of the view to thoroughly avoid the possibility of a Filipino Adolf Hitler (to win the war and maintain the peace, as it were). In fact, Secretary Pagdanganan’s might be the harmless version by a long shot of that racism, more in common with the Bulacan salo-salo’s jokes fair (no different from a U.S. Republican barbecue party that proclaims one’s base amidst laughter and prejudice) than with an Ortigas or Makati business district salary man’s restrained prayer that his former Chinese-Filipino boss be run over by a truck. After all, in Bulacan -- with some exceptions -- ceilings painted a color other than white may be tagged as Bisaya to a receptive laughing audience.
What turns something about someone into a racist slur, however, is when it ceases to be about that someone and starts to focus on that someone's mother and brothers. Maynila Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag’s Chinese enslaver would become a symbol of Lino Brockean racism when it ceases to portray a character (or reality of such an elemental or rampant presence) to become a sweeping synecdoche for an entire race, certainly not a Brockean fault but the critical angle’s. The Chinese corruptor of a local lass in Peque Gallaga’s classic movie Virgin Forest may also be read as racist symbology, but that would again certainly be a reader’s fault. Any critical perspective that generalizes a people via a purported symbolic presence of one or a few in one’s fictional or journalistic visions becomes a racist act, and we’ve all been guilty of such acts. The consolation, or matter for congratulation, is that sometimes we can turn human, with the ability to check our own hatred and ourselves.
Generalizations are often against another group, but yet not radically more often than against one’s own. When, in an attempt to be fair and self-critical, we start to consider this or that as a Filipino mark or weakness or strength (sometimes echoing another group's criticism of us), we could actually be doing our own people a disservice. After all, so many tags on Filipino behavior as Filipino were not exactly anthropologically proven to be exclusively Filipino. The “bahala na” attitude is, I believe, as much Filipino as it is Texan or German or British working class or Wall Street tycoon class. This type of consideration is also what stifles many a critic upon a group of artists, as when his/her expectations conceal or reveal a generalization. This tendency to be pseudo- or quasi-social scientistic often sacrifices a more compassionate understanding of, say, a Fil-Am author’s book as yet another portrait of human behavior in a setting instead of a demonstration of a Fil-Am-ness that’s been generalized upon this quasi-race as a collective reaction or self-assigned duty.
The wealthy Chinese-Filipino class, known for its protestations against intelligentsia or journalistic racism towards their group, is also known in corporate unions to generally possess a shallow generalization of the underpaid Filipino working class as a gullible, lazy, or corruptible class, perhaps for being blind or disinterested to the secrets of companies’ books. Generally, this wealthy class is known to flaunt a pride that sees itself, at times loudly proclaims itself, as indispensable to the health of the country. Pardon me, but don’t you think this is precisely the kind of racist conceit in a powerful entity/class that sows the seeds of a Hitlerian grove from a rotting soil inhabited by hungry worms, a racism therefore that bears that fruit that will eat the tree? This is the kind of racism that’s more dangerous than Pagdanganan’s jokes, because its effects are far more real, eliciting not simply walkouts but real trembling passions that's possibly forever waiting for a militarist Hitler to emerge from the whispers (whether in the shape of a communist, military man, or civilian nationalist politician). Failing to check this racism from above, therefore, who are we to pound on the racism of those below who merely react to stimuli, with their emotional reactions that in their turn fail to consider the magnificent Chinese-Filipino heroes in our midst (be they Tsinoy doctors, urban architects, anti-MSG restaurateurs, environmentalists, or consumer advocates). A war is brewing, peace needs be won.
But wait. For isn't it our economics itself that is the ultimate racist? For doesn’t it carry the view that says investment money must generally come from without for our boat to stay afloat? It will not buy the argument that perhaps we can better survive the global fluctuations of currencies and exchanges if we are to generally nurture investment money from within, farming small businesses instead of big multinational corporations and a nation of employees reliant on the ups and downs of foreign outlays. But what nation, in our generation of corporate-run government interests (or government-run corporate interests), would want to see a shortage of workers gone to rampant entrepreneurship? In this sense, governments of nations can be seen as racist to their own people, as if saying their people are not worth dying for but certainly worth killing for profits.
This, I believe, is the kind of big racism that losing presidential candidate John Kerry failed to communicate: in disappointing the hype (or focus) on the conflict of interest in G.W. Bush’s running a government at war and co-owning (with the bin Laden family) a company that contracts war tanks that won’t be useful in Afghanistan but would run smoothly in Iraq, he failed to communicate a racism that not only oppressed blacks but also whites and browns and yellows and reds. In failing to put United Defence and Unocal (and former Unocal consultant Hamid Karzai) in the limelight, John Kerry became suspect to Ralph Nader’s view of Republicans and Democrats as two partners run by corporate interests inimical to the American race’s health and wealth, the reason – so he claims -- why they cannot radically accuse each other of corporate leanings other than fleetingly.
WHO ISN'T RACIST? Even compassion with condescension
is racism by itself. Thus ends my humble painting of this gloomy world.
However, ladies and gentlemen, who isn’t not racist? For in the end, some Nazis found themselves selecting Jews they could hide.
Posted at the Bananacue
Republic website 11/09/04. Send
your comment to [email protected]
"This,
I believe, is the big racism that losing US presidential candidate John
Kerry failed to communicate: in disappointing the hype (or focus) on the
conflict of interest in G.W. Bush’s running a government at war and
co-owning (with the bin Laden family) a company that contracts war tanks
that won’t be useful in Afghanistan but would run smoothly in Iraq, he
failed to communicate a racism that not only oppressed blacks but also
whites and browns and yellows and reds."