That the whole world rejoiced in the stunning victory of Sen. Barack Obama we all saw this in CNN and the BBC… where there was rejoicing from Japan to Kenya. But what I found stunning in the American elections was the massive, albeit historic turnout not only for these elections, but also that impromptu rally in Grant Park, Chicago of Obama supporters, celebrating the change that is coming to America. It was akin to our EDSA Revolt where right here in Cebu, when we learned that the Marcoses have fled, we all went to Fuente Osmeña for an impromptu celebration… and to think those where the days we still didn’t have a cellphone.
But after the dust settles, there is a daunting task ahead of President-elect Barack Obama that hopefully will not drown out the euphoria of his historic election. I say historical because the election of the first Black man into the White House is a renewal of hope for the American dream, that anyone can become the President for as long as he has a message that the American voter would believe he would do. As Thomas Friedman, columnist of New York Times summed it up in a column the other day, “The American Civil War officially ended with the election of Obama.” That was nicely put.
Indeed, Obama has come a long way to mend the racial divide, where the white man once believed that they were a superior race compared to the colored Negroes. Of course, there will always be those people who cannot stand nor accept black people. But they are now considered a minority. But whether we like it or not, there will always be people with their biases. There are also people who still believe that they are superior as a race.
It is a fact that once upon a time Americans thought of Filipinos as an inferior race. I got this from the book I got some years ago, entitled, “Native Resistance: Philippine Cinema and Colonialism 1898-1941” a book written by Cloudland A. del Undo. Here’s an excerpt on this that I wrote in the Star.
“In 1904, the Filipinos were made into a major exhibit in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis. Over 1,200 natives were transported to the United States. The contingent was composed of a variety of Filipino ethnic groups—Visayans, Moros, Bagobos, Negritos, and Igorots. A Philippine village occupied a 47-acre site around Arrow Head Lake to the southwest of Forest Park. The exhibit highlighted “dog-eating, Igorots and stone age cannibals”; but, so as not to miss the point of the exposition, the “savage” lived side by side with the disciplined native constabulary that was formed by Philippine Governor William Howard Taft. The Filipino was displayed, studied, and culturally graded. When a few natives died on the site, anthropologists could not help but measure and analyze their brains.
Robert Rydell (author of All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions) sums up the message of the Philippine exposition: Under the primary direction of government—appointed scientists, the reservation affirmed the value of the islands to America’s commercial growth and created a scientifically validate impression of Filipinos as racially inferior and incapable of national self-determination in the near future.”
When I read that book, I found it unbelievable that Filipinos were once upon a time studied, culturally-graded and even displayed! The Americans then probably looked at us just like the way they looked at blacks or Native Americans as a “colored race” and therefore inferior. In fact I would like to believe that many Americans today still wrongly feel the same way about us Filipinos out of their own ignorance. But let me point out that this book was written about American imperialism and their commitment to spread American democracy into other shores. Hopefully that racial bias has vanished with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of America.
Today Filipinos still have to live with a homegrown ethnic bias… where Tagalog nationalists insist that they are ethnically superior to all other Filipinos. Like our former colonizers, they impose their own language upon the rest of us, claiming that this promotes Filipino unity. I say that this is total hogwash! Someday, we shall have a country where Tagalogs would respect all the other spoken languages in this country… that will be the day we shall see unity in this very culturally diverse nation… someday!
That change has come to America is a reality that we have witnessed and the rest of the world waits with bated breath as to what kind of change President-elect Barack Obama would institute. Meanwhile here in the Philippines, we too want real changes, changes that would make us truly proud as a nation, just like what happened 22-years ago during the EDSA Revolt where we threw the Marcos Dictatorship so we could usher real changes. But that has been denied the Filipino people. So once again we clamor for real change that only a Constitutional Convention (concon) can give this nation.
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For email responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mozcom.com or vsbobita@gmail.com. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.