“It depends,” Bubba said, “upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Today it seems to me that the word “racism” means more than what it used to mean. A white teenager in the U.S. who wore a Chinese-style dress to her high school prom was called, among other unpleasant things, a “closet racist.” (The New York Times reported that “Teenager’s Prom Dress Stirs Furor in U.S. — But Not in China.”)
If you wear a costume identified with another race/ethnic group, or if you mention anything about another race/ethnic group then you’re racist. This I think is the new additional meaning of the word.
The standard dictionary meaning of “racist” is still: “A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” I’m sticking to the dictionary definition.
In the southern United States, Jim Crow laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (by Democrats) to “institutionalize…economic, educational, and social disadvantages” for American citizens of African descent. Interracial marriages and sex were prohibited. As U.S. Congressman Seaborn Roddenbery, Democrat of Georgia, would put it in a 1912 speech: “Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government. It is subversive of social peace…. Let us uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy.”
Everyone knows — or should know — the horror stories from that explicitly and undeniably racist era.
oOo
But perhaps not a lot of us are aware that in the 1930s, when the P.I. was still an American possession, there were about 40,000 Filipino workers on the mainland U.S., and more than half of them were agricultural workers. At the time, Filipinos were considered American nationals. (My source for the following narrative is the 1989 book “In the Heart of Filipino America” by Professor Ronald Takaki of the University of California at Berkeley.)
American farmers considered their Filipino workers as ideally suited for “stoop labor.” According to a California newspaper editorial, “White men can’t do the work as well as these short men who can get down on their hands and knees, or work all day long stooping over.” One American grower said he liked to hire Filipinos because they were single men and could be housed inexpensively. “These Mexicans…bring their families with them and I have to fix up houses; but I can put a hundred Filipinos in that barn,” and he pointed to a large firetrap. A secretary of an agricultural association said in 1930: “It must be realized that the Filipino is just the same as the manure that we put on the land — just the same.” On the doors of hotels, Filipinos often read signs saying, “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.” This was on the West Coast. Said one of the Filipino workers: “We do not find that the United States government puts its theories into practice. In school in the [P.I.] we learn from the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. But when we get over here we find people treating us as if we were inferior.”
In Dec. 1929, an anti-Filipino race riot exploded in Watsonville, California because a Filipino got engaged with a white American girl (with her mother’s approval). “Four hundred white men attacked a Filipino dance hall. During four terrible days of rioting, many Filipinos were beaten and one was shot to death.” A judge blamed the Filipinos for “provoking” the violence. “Damn the Filipino!” the judge said; “he won’t keep his place.” For an American writer of a Baltimore newspaper, “The Filipinos got into trouble at Watsonville because they…danced better, and spent their money more lavishly than their Nordic fellow farmhands and, therefore, appealed more than some of the latter to the local [white] girls.” A white man told a U.S. congressional committee on immigration in 1930 that “the Filipinos are…a social menace as they will not leave our white girls alone and frequently intermarry.”
oOo
And so when I’m asked about “racism in the NMI,” my short answer, based on my experience and on what I’ve learned from history: there is no racism, “systemic” or otherwise, in the NMI where I have lived and worked since 1993. (This year also marks my 30th as a journalist. Twenty-seven of those years were spent here.) Again, let me reiterate that when I say racism I refer to its standard dictionary meaning.
In the 1990s, when labor-abuse stories involving foreign workers were the daily fare of newspaper readers, some said that these cases (which were mostly about non-payment of wages) involved “racism.” Among the alleged “abusers” were locals, and the alleged “abusees” were usually Filipinos. But as I pointed out back then, locals and Filipinos, more or less, belong to the same race. And there are no Jim Crow laws in the NMI. There are plenty of inter-racial/ethnic marriages, and it is against the law to discriminate against anyone on the bases of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability or age. Unlike the anti-littering law, the anti-discrimination law is actually enforced.
But I’m not saying that there are no longer Jim Crow racists in our midst or in the states and around the world. These are the folks who believe, among other things, that there are inferior or defective races/ethnic groups who, for their own good, should be ruled by superior races/ethnic groups. (That’s the basic racist belief. Compare it to the basic Leftist creed: There are ignorant/immoral/weak people who, for their own good, should be ruled by the experts, the virtuous and the strong.)
I think that today, Jim Crow racists constitute a tiny minority like flat Earthers or Satanists. But then again, as we all know, race/ethnicity is a highly emotional issue, and a lot of other people have other opinions about it. As for me, I can only offer the following paraphrase of a poem by the Filipino writer Butch Dalisay:
We don wanna be jus men
We don wanna be jus women
We don wanna be jus a minority
We don wanna be jus exotic
We jus wanna be people,
OK,
OK,
OK?
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