Deconstructing "Interracial"...

So I'm in Vancouver visiting the cousins. We're at Pin Pin, the Filipino eatery, and everyone is snickering over the latest family joke as the row of Pinoys stare across the table at their White significant others, some of whom are daringly digging into the mystery meat, dinaguan. Being as unabashedly un-PC as we are, there is talk about accidentally "wiping-out the Filipino blood in our family" if the kids keep on dating and marrying Caucasians--an obvious pattern considering all four of us are in mixed-race relationships...

But besides some minor cultural barriers (ie. never referring to filipino elders by their first name--EVER--but instead using the universal Tita/Tito and Lola/Lolo--unless you want to risk a harsh slipper to the rear end; or accepting the fact that Filipinos will always eat fish with their hands since it's the most common sense way to pick out the bones), all of our boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, and wives have embraced our colourful family dynamic, while our Pinoy relatives have lovingly welcomed the in-laws with open arms despite the obvious interracial-ness of our relationships.

Sadly, I know the issue would have been a lot more controversial just a generation ago...

When my aunt arrived in Canada over 40 years ago, she was only 22 years-old. Winnipeg's Health Science Centre was recruiting nurses from abroad to join their growing team and my auntie, straight out of Nursing School, was forturnate enough to be chosen for the program. She was elated. The hospital was acting as her official sponsor so Auntie would have no problem gaining her permanent residency, and the accelerated training program would allow her to receive her Canadian RN credentials in no time. When it was all said and done, she would become the first Filipina nurse--EVER--at the Health Science Centre.

Somewhere along the way, Auntie had started dating. A young and strapping army sergeant began courting her and soon after, they were married. And even though the couple were happy and successful with up-and-coming careers, there was an undercurrent of disconnect brewing on her side of the family.

Auntie's new husband was Black and not everyone was on-board with this mixed-race marriage.

And without getting into the specifics of this family drama, I will tell you that for awhile, things did get a little ugly. Hurtful words were spoken, spiteful letters were written, and at times, entire family bonds were lost on account of their interracial courtship. To think, all of this fuss began over two shades of brown....

But that was then and this is now.

Our family has come full-circle from those days. Family gatherings are now a halo-halo of our multicultural roots--boisterous conversations in English laced with the native Cebuano, a bunch of White guys getting schooled while attempting to take on the Titas and Lolas in a game of Pusoy, and a husband proudly serving-up his first dish of pancit palabok after his mother-in-law gave him her secret recipe...

What Makes You a Filipino?

What is the essence of a culture?


Is it language? Values? History?


Can we possibly pinpoint a single attribute that authenticates one's culture?

Recently, I discovered the Speak Out series on Youtube that originally aired on The Filipino Channel. A Filipino-centric talk show, Speak Out explores relevant issues in a town hall meeting-style forum.


So what happened when they got a group of Philippine and American-born Filipinos together to define the Pinoy identity ?


Well, let's just say it involved a heated debate about the subjective essence of Filipino-ness (you can watch the program HERE):

Assimilating into American culture...

• "The message that I received was that my Filipino-ness was not good enough. And that I will not be accepted by my accent and by the way I dress. In essence, I have to shed my self of my Filipino-ness."
  

The language debate...

• "They expect us to explain our [Filipino] club...you know...our mission statement in Tagalog. And then they came up and said, 'We don't think you should call yourself Filipino because you can't even speak the language!'"

• "How are you going to tell me that you're a Filipino organization and you can't even speak Tagalog?! The essence--the foundation--of that organization...you can't even explain!"
  

What is American?

• "What does Americanization mean or what is the American Dream? And who is American? When we think about this...when we think about this concept...most people think about White folks. So if a Filipino wants to be a Filipino American, are you trying to be White or trying to have the ideals of America--of freedom and democracy, and have wealth and privilege?"

What is Filipino?

• "Let's just reverse the question: What does it mean to be Filipino? Does it mean chinellas (slippers) in the winter? Or does it mean putting our parents on a pedestal? "
  

Needless to say, the program stirred up a lot of strong feelings regarding the cultural authenticity of a Filipino, and I have to say I was getting pretty riled-up in the process! I guess the whole debate caught me off guard since I didn't realize such a strong rift existed between these two groups of Filipinos...but then...after thinking about it, I started to get it.

How can we strip one of their Filipino-ness on account of the fact that they may not speak Tagalog, but instead speak "fluent" English? Many of our parents believed that raising us in North America accent-free would allow us to become more successful within the larger culture, having encountered their own challenges with discrimination when immigrating to the new country. But the the seed of European superiority was obviously planted long ago...

Why do we often convince new Filipino immigrants that being American or being Canadian trumps being Pinoy? What is really dividing us? Why do Filipino American and Canadian kids often ignore their Philippine-born counterparts at school? Is it really because of their accents? OR is it because new Filipino immigrants remind us that we came from a place that's often been suppressed by our "good English" and North American privilege?

So what makes you a Filipino?

Family
loyalty is layers
of strength
as many Pinays
runs through my veins
my brown skin
at times
triggered the taunts
that have lingered
along
with Those dark times
All Pinoys share
the mountain
from which I see the world
and the way
that world
wishes to see me.

Video Cop-out: Def Poetry Jam Featuring Filipino American poet--Marlon Unas Esguerra

In my search for Filipino poets on YouTube, I found Marlon Unas Esguerra's moving spoken word performance from Def Poetry. His poem really struck a nerve with me...

What's your heritage?

When I first started my blog back in November, it felt like I was this leaky faucet just dripping with ideas. My inspiration stemmed from my desire to explore the unique faces of the Pinay identity. It was a way of reaffirming my own sense of self since coming into my mixed Filipina Canadian heritage had definitely been a work in progress.

Throughout my youth, I had convinced myself that I was a Canadian that just happened to be Filipino. So being a Filipina was merely a consequence of my ancestry. Whenever I answered the well-played-out What's your heritage? question, I always felt the need to emphasize my Canadian-ness in my explanation: “I was born in Canada but my family is from the Philippines.”

It was a reflex I had developed over the years in order to convince people that I really was one of them even though I didn’t look like them. It was a second skin I had grown way back in elementary school when kids would shrug their shoulders and crinkle up their faces in puzzlement whenever I said I was a Filipino, as if this was synonymous with me saying I am a Martian. And at the time, it was my way of resolving both my Filipino and Canadian identities since I perceived them to be two diametrically opposed entities.

Complicating matters even more was the way my family always seemed to blame my teenage shortcomings (ie. cutting classes and missing curfew) on my Canadian (ahem...White) friends, convinced that all of my own free will suddenly flew out the window when I was in the company of these infamous ringleaders.

While peer pressure obviously played a large part in my teenage rebellion, I'm pretty sure that race had nothing to do with anything considering I knew a bunch of Filipino kids, and Chinese kids, and Indian kids who used to smoke cigarettes and cut classes all the time. It was like a right of passage or something. But before I get carried away here, my point is that my family had harnessed these discriminative notions of Canadian culture from their own coming to America experiences. To them, I was doing my Pinay heritage a grave injustice by behaving more Canadian. What that really meant was well beyond me and somehow I felt like I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.

So with all sob stories aside...

I started to figure things out. Seeing the amazing work done by Dr. Melinda L. de Jesus (Pinay Power Peminist Critical Theory: Theorizing the Filipina/American Experience) and Sabrina Margarita Alcantara-Tan (Bamboo Girl) made me realize that I was walking down a well-worn path paved away by millions of other Filipina Canadians and Americans. We were nurses, and punks, and teachers, and queers, and professors, and activists. Some of us could speak Tagalog, while others could barely utter a single sentence in our ancestral tongue due to highly held values of assimilation. Some of us were raised in strict Catholic households where girls were just girls, while others were taught the values of Pinay Power. But despite our uniqueness, we were all Filipinas.

As I began to connect the dots, I couldn't help but feel this overwhelming affinity for all of the women in my family.

So what's my heritage?

While I was the only Filipina at those punk rock shows, my aunt was the first Filipina nurse to arrive at Winnipeg’s Health Science Centre. As I crowd-surfed my way closer to my favourite band, yet another aunt carried her sister on her back as they fled from the Japanese during the Second World War. And even though I had earned my own shred of street credibility, my mother was busy earning two academic degrees and balancing the responsibilities of single motherhood.

That's who I am...

**Note: A section of this post was previously published in my article,"That's What a Filipina Is!", which appears in the latest issue of RicePaper Magazine.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...The Other Beauty

Who's the fairest of all?

While we relentlessly convince North American women to be forever youthful with big breasts, teeny waists, white teeth, clear skin, fatless figures, waxed bodies, and designer jeans...

...many women of colour struggle with being too dark-skinned, squinty-eyed, kinky-haired, flat-faced, big-lipped, wide-nosed...

Judging by these impossible expectations, one can't really win!

In Filipino culture, a light-skinned ideal has been perpetuated by what I like to call, mestiza posturing. Mestiza/mestizo is a term borrowed from Spanish to mean one who has mixed indigenous and European blood, and even if individuals do not have this mixed descent, this look often governs mainstream perceptions of beauty. Just take a look at these major Filipina celebrities:

Vina Morales

K.C. Concepcion

Jennylyn Mercado

Taking this idea even further, mestiza posturing can also be seen as a bi-product of the Philippines' colonial/feudalistic legacy in which a system of white authority and brown inferiority was built upon the appropriated archipelago.

In "Emil's Big Chance Makes Me Feel Uneasy," Tricia Capistrano, reveals how much of her life has been dictated by this mestiza complex. She describes this underlying "white is right" consciousness:

I am a brown-skinned woman from the Philippines, where many people I know have a fascination with the lighter skinned--probably because our islands were invaded so many times by whites who tried to convince us that they were better and more beautiful than us. We were under Spain's rule for nearly 400 years, the United States' for almost 50. As a result, skin-whitening products fly off the pharmacy shelves.

With this notion of light-skinned superiority ingrained deeply into her teenage consciousness, Capistrano admits how she used to "hang out with the mestizas, because I wanted to be popular like them." And the quest for whiteness didn't stop there. While her grandmother cringed at the idea of her already dark skin becoming even darker at a friend's pool party, Capistrano's own mother encouraged her to start pinching the bridge of her nose everyday in hopes of "arching" its imperfectly flat surface.

After giving birth to her son, Emil, Capistrano was suddenly able to see the other side of the equation. Emil was a fair-skinned mestizo of Swedish/Dutch and Filipino descent which automatically made him a member of the most exclusive club. This became even more apparent during a family trip to the Philippines when Capistrano was continually bombarded by a slew of Filipina admirers ogling at her mestizo son. He's so cute! So fair-skinned!--they would exclaim.

Fearing the cost of Emil's future college education, Capistrano even considered moving back to the Philippines permanently, confident that her son could easily land a part doing baby commercials. When she was on the verge of booking an agent, Capistrano suddenly reconsidered her plans: "I realized that I was going to be part of the system that can sometimes make us dark-skinned people believe that we are inferior. I do not want Filipino children who look like me to feel bad about themselves....

***************

So even though I've focused the majority of this discussion on the Philippine perspective of beauty, I would like to turn your attention to another demographic--African American women. A friend of mine recently recommended this documentary featurette, A Girl Like Me, directed by a 17 year-old filmmaker, Kiri Davis. In her film, Davis insightfully explores perceptions of beauty through the eyes of African American girls. Like their Filipina counterparts, these young women reveal how they are often taught to perceive lighter-skin as more beautiful, while sometimes feeling pressured to surrender their traditional curls for the tamed relaxed look.

Without further ado, watch A Girl Like Me right here:

Related Resources

Borderlands/ La Frontera: A New Mestiza--Gloria Anzaldua

Emulated through Images: The Globalization of Misconstructed African American Beauty and Hip-Hop Culture--John Hendrick Clarke

Liminality and mestiza consciousness in Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons --Melissa de Jesus

Metaphors of a Mestiza Consciousness --Erika Aigner-Varoz

Tagalog Movies and Identity :Portrayals of the Filipino Self --James F. Kenny

Lee Thomas: A Black Man Turning White

"Some people act like they don't even see it…Some people stop right in their tracks staring. But there was another time I walked into a room and saw a little girl, about two[years-old], and she looked at my face and screamed. I didn't leave the house for two weeks after that one...The look on her face, she was scared...And you know when a child's in danger or a child is fearful, you want to reach out and help them, right? But if reached out to help her, I was the one scaring her so I felt helpless. And because of that, I didn't know what to do. What do you do?"--Lee Thompson

At 25 years-old, the world has suddenly become your oyster. You are on the brink of getting that first big break in the broadcasting industry--a stint as an entertainment reporter on an ABC affiliate in New York City. Not bad at all...

...well...except for the fact that your barber has found some unusual white patches on your scalp. There's no need to become too alarmed, right? It doesn't seem like that big of a deal...but...you have also found some white spots on your hands...and now these damn spots just won't go away!

Vitiligo. This is the diagnosis Lee Thompson's doctor made upon observing this rapid loss in his skin's pigmentation. A progressive skin disorder in which pigment-producing cells begin to suddenly die, vitiligo sadly has no cure. So in essence, Thompson had just been told that he was an African American-man-turning-white and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it...

What was he going to do?!

He was a successful broadcaster on television, yes television, so his job depended on his appearance. But there was also the more significant implications of his impending whiteness. Previously concrete truths regarding race, identity, and in turn, his own sense of self were now horribly thrown out of whack. Was he still a Black man even though he was becoming white?

So Thompson did what most of us would do--he hid the vitiligo, both figuratively and literally, under a mask of creams and make-up. This was his reasoning:

I wear the make-up because it makes it easier…not just easier for me…but easier for other people to deal with me...News isn't about me, it's about the information.So I put the make-up on so they can hear me.

He kept his condition a secret for four whole years until the vitiligo became impossible to hide, spreading to his arms, hands, and even face. So Thompson knew he had to come clean.


Once he revealed the truth to his colleagues at Fox News Detroit, Thompson decided not just to stop there. He decided to speak about his experiences with vitiligo, ON-AIR, in which he appeared for the first time on camera without any make-up. This was a huge moment for him...

After receiving countless letters of support and encouragement regarding his story, Thompson was especially moved by the responses from children suffering from vitiligo. One little boy wrote a letter asking him to continue telling people about the disease so that the kids at school would stop making fun of him. From that moment on, Thompson became committed to the cause.


Not only has he started the first vitiligo support group in Michigan, Thompson wrote his memoir, Turning White, complete with several candid photos, in order to educate others on his disease. He is also using some of the proceeds from the book to fund his support group. And even though Thompson used to think that vitiligo threatened to take a part of him away, he now sees things very differently:

This thing is kind of like a superhero. If one thing is taken from you, then something else is given to you--some kind of strength. Since my pigment's losing, I must have some other something to make me strong…I didn't get super strength or speed or anything like that…but what I did get…is the power of speech.

What are your thoughts on Thompson's story?

Watch Turning White video documentary HERE.

Watch Lee Thomas interview on The Hour HERE.