Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1353/cro.2024.a963636

Abstract

An often-heard truism among homeland Filipinos in conversations with their diasporic counterparts in the United States is the notion that race and racism are irrelevant categories when it comes to the Philippines. 'Don't export your racism to us,' is the usual protest. 'There's no racism in the Philippines.We all descend from the islands' original peoples.' Wary—and rightfully so—of the often-decontextualized exportation of debates and discourses to the home country (as has been the case historically in a kind of center-periphery trajectory), one interlocutor quips: 'You cannot employ the white settler colonizer vs. Indigenous in North America to the paradigm of the Philippines. … People from the Philippines, yes, including many from different Indigenous groups … do not consider themselves so removed from [other] Filipinos who are not part of their heritage.'

INTRODUCTION

race: an irrelevant category in the philippine situation?

An often-heard truism among homeland Filipinos in conversations with their diasporic counterparts in the United States is the notion that race and racism are irrelevant categories when it comes to the Philippines. "Don't export your racism to us," is the usual protest. "There's no racism in the Philippines. We all descend from the islands' original peoples." Wary—and rightfully so—of the often-decontextualized exportation of debates and discourses to the home country (as has been the case historically in a kind of center-periphery trajectory), one interlocutor quips: "You cannot employ the white settler colonizer vs. Indigenous in North America to the paradigm of the Philippines. … People from the Philippines, yes, including many from different Indigenous groups … do not consider themselves so removed from [other] Filipinos who are not part of their heritage."

Indeed, notwithstanding the country's nearly four centuries of Euro-American colonization, the Philippines has not had the majority of its population supplanted by white colonial settlers in the way that, for example, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada experienced. Yet, we might ask: Are there ways in which the dynamic of race and racism may nonetheless be operative similarly within the nation's social fabric, and, if so, how (and where) might we trace its origins and manifestations?

In this study, I contend that racism in the Philippines is the bastard child of the union between colonial Christianity and civilizational supremacy. Now largely secularized, its most overt manifestation may be said to be in state policy—not without sanction from the public—toward the country's indigenous populations. Ironically, despite the enactment into law in 1997 of some of the most progressive protections for the rights [End Page 465] of indigenous peoples (i.e., the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act or IPRA Law), the foreclosures around land-based, subsistence ways of living (i.e., life lived on the land outside the market economy)—deemed signifiers of "backwardness" and "primitivism"—manifests the prejudice. As such, the only allowable mode of relation vis-à-vis the state's indigenous populations remains assimilationist, celebrating "otherness" in cultural expression for tourism purposes contributing to GDP, but sanctioning and punishing any kindred political advocacy for land and life.2

Although by no means unique to the Philippine situation—since virtually every national entity on the planet is now compelled to modernize and prioritize compliance with the demands of a globalized market economy—the presence of the IPRA law in the Philippine case adds to the conundrum. How reconcile the avowed mandate to respect indigenous difference and autonomy, on the one hand, and, on the other, keep growing an economy that requires unhampered exploitation of new land and "resources," almost exclusively located in indigenous territories? The answer, I would argue, is racism—the racialization (and pathologizing) of indigenous subjectivity and ways of living as "inferior to and encumbrances on" modern priorities that then mandates exploitation of "reserved" indigenous lands. And this is done through the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples, separating them from the ancestral territories that have been their source of life and subsistence and making them as dependent on the industrial market economy as everybody else—thus freeing up land for exploitation.

Such a conundrum appears to have been a historical set up for the Philippines right from the get-go—a situation in which anti-colonialist resistance quickly ends up mirroring the very face of the enemy, with the racial animus now directed towards its own internal others. Resisting foreign rule but not its civilizing oeuvre, the nascent nation-state—post-independence—was compelled to accede to the requisites of modern nation state-building to prove its own "civilizational worthiness." Along with economic development, American-style modern education became the centerpiece of such a nation-building project, enshrining the ideals of "progress" and modern "advancement" in the country's ideological state apparatuses—in the schools, churches, media outlets, and, most importantly, in public policy.

The fledgling nation, still reeling from nearly four centuries of colonial indoctrination...