The Role of Whiteness in the Philippines

In Vincente Rafael’s White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, he explored writings by women from the United States in order to examine the role of white women in the benevolent assimilation of the Philippines. Based on these readings, he concludes that “through the avid gaze of the natives, white women find their bodies mirrored back to them, returning as uncanny and therefore undomesticated figures available for public and promiscuous solicitation” (Rafael, 2000, p. 65). Since arriving to the Philippines as a white woman, I have had the same experiences that these women wrote about in the early 1900s. As I walked down the streets in Makati, men felt comfortable calling out to me and commenting on my appearance. In one case, a group of men stopped playing basketball to call out to me, “Hey, Barbie! Come here, Barbie!”

In our class discussion, we focused on how white women as well as mestizas are treated in the Philippines. I was asked if my experiences in the Philippines were similar to what I would experience in the United States. Even though catcalling does exist in the United States, I have rarely experienced it during a casual walk down the street. Where I feel I can go unnoticed in the United States, I feel like I cannot do the same in the Philippines. It makes me hyperaware of who I am and what I look like. I feel that I am objectified by how I look on the outside; I am scrutinized in everything I do in a way I am not used to back home.

Perhaps this shift comes from the idea that, in the Philippines, whiteness is “predicated on rather than freed from difference” (Rafael, 2000, p. 65). In America, many people of European descent have disassociated themselves with their past history and instead taken on the role of being white rather than be German, Spanish, Italian, etc. I personally have little knowledge of my family descent and history which has perhaps been forgotten so to further fit in with the American standard of white. In the United States, people of a multitude of backgrounds merge together to fit in. In that way, whiteness in the United States is free of difference and relies on the idea of fitting in to a certain standard. However, if you do not fit that standard, you face being ostracized and treated as inferior. On the other hand, in the Philippines, whiteness is no longer defined as devoid of difference and is instead based on being different.

Another excerpt from Rafael’s (2000) book states that “colonial domesticity in the tropics heralded the conjugation of whiteness with femininity as a sign of public entitlement as well as a source of private ambivalence” (p. 53). I have experience remnants of his statement in my past week in the Philippines. I feel privileged—not based on my actions or intentions but based on how I look. This can be represented by one of my first experiences in the Philippines when I checked into the New World Manila Bay Hotel and was rushed to the front of the line, past the other guests who were patiently waiting before me. I felt uncomfortable yet helpless in the situation because this treatment seemed like standard procedure to the workers yet is very foreign to me.

In the end, I start to wonder if the constant attention or hyperawareness of one’s actions is how it may be to be non-white in the United States. How can the experience of being a white woman in the Philippines be related to or contrasted by the experience of being non-white in the United States?

References

Rafael, V. (2000). Colonial domesticity: Engendering race at the edge of empire, 1899-1912. In White love and other events in Filipino history. (pp. 52-76). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.