Racism as colonialism: Jefferson, Obama and us

Way back in the early ‘90s, I was asked to speak about our American colonial experience before a university audience at the International House in Berkeley. I went to the United States for the first time in 1955 and for three months, with a US State Department grant and a princely per diem of $12 a day, I crisscrossed that vast continent. Since then, I had visited that land of milk and honey on so many occasions; if I were to name the three most deadly sins of the Americans, the first is racism, then wastefulness and the third, smugness. After my talk, a retired black professor commented that I had glossed over racism. I told him they were doing so much about it from what I know of that problem in the ‘50s when I visited the South and saw segregation at its worst. He agreed; indeed, the Americans have narrowed the racial divide but not their wastefulness and smugness.

The entry on January 20 of Barack Obama and his family in the White House — the residence of this world’s most powerful single individual — has elicited universal encomia, and so many expectations as well.

Let us now peruse briefly racial discrimination by our former colonizers bearing in mind that they passed on to us not just their genes but their vices, not their virtues.

For all its might America is a young country of immigrants. The first went there because of religious persecution in England. The United States then should be the last nation on earth where racial discrimination would thrive, given this background — but it flourished when succeeding settlers brought slaves from Africa to work in the plantations in the South.

It is one of those historical ironies that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, was not only the owner of several slaves but had a mistress who was one.

When his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, died, it would seem that he promised her he would never marry again. His wife’s half sister, Sally, was black. She was with Jefferson when he was in Paris; Jefferson was 46 and Sally was 16. She bore Jefferson’s child and six others; all of whom bore Jefferson’s name.

Sally could have stayed on in France as a free woman because there was no slavery in France, but she went back to the United States and lived in Jefferson’s beautiful home, Monticello.

It is presumed that there was affectionate bonding between the two and that when their children reached the age of 21, Jefferson would free them. When Charles Dickens, the English novelist, visited Washington, he heard of this not-too-secret story and he satirized it. All these delicious details, dug up through extensive research, are in Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book, The Hemingses of Monticello.

The American Civil War (1861-1865) resolved the conundrum of slavery. Great moral issues create equally great moral leaders, Abraham Lincoln in this Civil War. Great writers as well, from the oppressed — Ralph Elison, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, to name just a few of the blacks who brought their artistic skills to fruition in their depiction of the injustices their forebears suffered. And in South Africa, non-Blacks like Nadine Gordimer and Alan Paton.

Racism in America is directed not just to the blacks but to the Jews who, though a small minority, have a lot of economic and cultural clout. Asians, Latinos have not been spared. And of course, Filipinos, as the writer Carlos Bulosan tells it only too movingly in his book, America is in the Heart.

Anti-miscegenation laws in California, for instance, were aimed at Asians and a Filipino was even lynched for cohabiting with a white woman.

From time immemorial, racism has existed all over the world in so many forms, as religious bias, and not just as color. We are only too familiar with how Hitler massacred millions of Jews in gas chambers in the concentration camps in Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.In Japan, racial discrimination is subtle but very demanding and real. The Japanese believe they are a superior and divine race; they regard all other Asians as inferior — but not Caucasians. The natives who do dirty jobs, the burakumin, are regarded as low caste and are avoided in marriage. So are the Koreans though they have lived in Japan for generations. Birth records are well preserved and it is not difficult to check and trace one’s lineage.

The term gaijin, though it refers primarily to foreigners, illustrates the quiet subtlety of Japanese racial discrimination. It is easy to justify the exclusivity of the natives, the need for harmony of millions packed tightly in a small island nation. Ever polite, ever hospitable, discrimination in Japan does not scream at outsiders; it lurks behind those ritual bows, beneath the dizzying patina of modernity that suffuses this powerful, well-bonded nation — the second richest in the world.

And what about Mother Espana which once shaped an empire where “the sun never sets”?             The ultimate specter of racial discrimination is in the Spanish Inquisition, which started in the 14th century, was revived two centuries later and persisted all through the 19th century. Led by the Dominicans and those exemplar rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, it was first established by Rome to combat the Reformation; it burgeoned in Spain independent of the Vatican. Its inquisitors burned books, seized properties of infidels, drove the Jews out, enforced conversions on them and the Moors. By its “acts of faith” it tortured and burned at the stake thousands upon thousands. With its fanatical search for doctrinal purity and cleansing of the blood (limpieza de sangre), it crippled the financiers, the royalty. It eventually defined the Spanish character; as the Spanish writer, Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, explained it: there was no industry in Spain; the bullfights, the long siesta, the laziness of Spaniards — all these were the after-effects of the Inquisition.

Maybe so, but this vaulting aberration also produced the world’s greatest novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha.

And for us, the Noli and Fili.

What about us brown Indios? Of course, we are racists, too; and we discriminate most against our ethnics — the aetas, the manyans…

But first, we as victims. Serapio/Canceran, President Quezon’s private secretary, told me about a pre-war Caucasian club in Manila that did not admit Indios until one evening when this club was celebrating an annual ball. Quezon marched into it with a Constabulary sergeant and a huge Doberman and announced to the well-groomed assembly that he would close the club, if…

And among us are Spanish mestizo families still who do not want their bloodline diluted with mongrel genes. I know of a very sophisticated, pretty Indio girl whose boyfriend was a Spanish mestizo. All long I presumed that they had gotten married and were now living happily somewhere in Pangasinan. It didn’t turn out that way; the mestizo dumped her in accordance with the family dictate, went to Spain and married a Spanish girl instead.

We grow up mouthing limericks like Intsik Baboy, tulo laway, bahay silong knowing only too well that Chinese parents don’t want their daughters to marry Indios.

Lilia G. Hernandez, my doctor when I am in America, is semi-retired after a very successful practice in California. Her family has a beautiful home in Pleasanton an hour away from San Francisco. She and her husband, an engineer, founded Tambalan, an NGO devoted to helping Filipinos. She visited Manila the other week and here is her latest communication:

“The more time I spend in my country of birth, the more I feel so discriminated against by people whose language I speak, whose skin color is mine, whose poor I dedicate more of my time to. 

“On one of my trips in 2006, an Italian-American came with me to see the programs my group in the Bay Area help support financially. On that same trip, my husband was finalizing plans for a house with the architect. My husband (a Filipino-American), the Italian-American and myself went to the site. Standing close to my husband, I stepped aside for a local woman to pass. She asked ‘Are you and your husband (pointing at the Italian-American some meters away) the ones who are building a house here?’ I was so surprised, and pointed at the man beside me as my husband. I soon realized that people thought I had to have a white man to be able to build a nice house in the Philippines!

 “One of the reasons I travel to the Philippines is to bring Americans to see what locals do to help improve themselves through community effort. These people going on an ‘exposure’ may be native-born Americans, Caucasians, or Filipinos who have immigrated to the United States.

“Upon arrival at the airport, one customs officer mumbled questions concerning what was in my suitcases (cheap school supplies I got from Target to give away, a few medical supplies donated by health professionals). Before I stepped aside to open my suitcases, I mentioned to him in Bisaya that the lady after me was my guest. My friend noticed the sudden change in his facial expression when he saw her, and how quickly we were sent through (without opening my suitcases), so quickly that my friend had to ask ‘What was that all about?’ Perhaps the guy thought I was a returning domestic helper, an easy target for a bribe, until he saw that I had to be someone ‘important’ to have a white guest.

“On checking in at hotels, in department stores, she was always given more attention. The most blatant was our visit to the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). At the door, I was asked to open my tiny purse and to surrender my camera. My white friend, with a 24”x18” bag, bulging with a high-powered camera, breezed through. I did not say anything until after coming out, when I told the chief of security, the very guy who insisted on taking my camera ‘unit,’ that their discrimination against their kapwa (fellow) Filipinos was truly disgusting. 

“As I was leaving, I proceeded to the Cathay Pacific Business Class check-in line. (Being a frequent flyer, I have the privilege of checking in through business even if I am traveling economy.) “Ma’am,” a guard said, “that’s the business class line.” So why didn’t he stop the brusque-looking white man with a young Filipino lass, and a Chinese man before me? I recalled what Barack Obama wrote in his book, when he and his half-sister were waiting to be served at a bar in Kenya — ignored, as the white patrons were attended to!”

Indeed, Filipinos also ridicule their countrymen because of their looks, because someone has a low chin (baba), cubitus varus (kumang), slit eyes (singkit) or is bald. The journalist Arsenio Lacson poked fun at President Carlos P. Garcia because he was quite dark. The antic could be considered funny, as it was staged in the past by the Reycard Duet, or the comedians Pogo and Togo. But it can also be disastrous when such remarks impede recognition of integrity, or intellectual and artistic rigor.

What is often said of us can be self-fulfilling: Caviteños are dangerous. Batanguenos are naked without their balisong. Pangasinenses are filthy. Warays and Negrenses are profligate and indolent. So the Capampangans have dugong aso, the Boholanos are stupid, the Moros are traitors, the Ilokanos may be hard working and thrifty but they are dumb like carabao. And nobody now takes us seriously, for as a famous American editor confided, how can he when our leaders are “silly”?

All such farcical clichés have a way of insinuating themselves into the national psyche and every day, they are aggravated by the nonsense on our TV screens, on the front pages of our newspapers. And we are outraged when the BBC pokes fun at our maids in London. So we ask again, whose fault is it?

What event of such apocalyptic magnitude or epiphanic redemption would rid us of racism and truly humanize us? Maybe it will be the forthcoming catastrophe of climate change, maybe an invasion from outer space that will threaten the whole world itself, or some such pandemic that threatens to decimate the human species.

Shakespeare said it is conscience that makes cowards of us all.

This is one of those asinine afterthoughts; perhaps, it is best that the Spaniards colonized us, that we did not become Hindus, else we would have the caste system which ordains that “we are born unequal, live unequal and die unequal.”

What, then, makes us all equal?

So the beautiful Taj Mahal commemorates a loved one’s passing, and the pyramids are supposed to last as a refuge in the afterlives of the pharaohs. All those hundreds of terra cotta warriors excavated in China are to safeguard an emperor’s journey to the great beyond.

Whatever, death is the great leveler and if we only thought more often of this ultimate truth — that we cannot bring anything with us — then, perhaps, ours would be a safer and more just society.

Remember when the Nazis grabbed a contiguous piece of real estate in the late ‘30s? Hitler crowed: “Today Sudetenland, tomorrow the world.”

In a way, Obama’s victory is a shining triumph of democracy. It signifies not just the final liberation of the Black Man but all of the world’s oppressed from the bondage of race. Truly this is the greening of America, and prayerfully, tomorrow, the world as well.

But I have news for all of us who placed our bets on Barack Obama. Racism will continue in America, and everywhere, though possibly in a more muted form.