Those panelists last week were hella elitist

Aedan Roberts

Blogpost week 3

            Sitting in the audience of the “Politics in the Wake of EDSA” forum at the prestigious Ateneo University, I took for granted the language that the five experts had been speaking. At first, it seemed only natural to me that these highly educated Philippine academics would be bombarding the audience with an English vocabulary twice the size of mine– using my language to perfectly articulate their ideas about the Filipino President to an audience that was almost entirely Filipino. It wasn’t until someone stood up and asked a question in a language I didn’t understand, and I heard the audience’s ecstatic response, that I realized what was going on. This is a very rough translation through Marijo (who only knows Tagalog), but the man said something like “I’m from Visayas. And I’m going to ask my question in my own language.”

A display at the wall of heroes museum depicts the Filipino class divide

            Filipino society is deeply stratified, to the point that, as Prof. Rafael pointed out to us a couple weeks ago in class, many Filipinos believe it to be inherently and necessarily unequal. The panelists we visited made their own perceptions of inherent class division obvious when they used terms like “civil society” (as distinct from the presumably less-civil masses who elected Duterte.) But what makes this Filipino separation of Elite from proletariat so unique and interesting is that it goes beyond material disparities (although, as our friend 15-car-Enrique demonstrates, these are staggering)– there’s an actual language barrier. As Constantino (1982) observes, “English has become a status symbol, while the native tongues are looked down upon” (Constantino, 1982, 188.) The result is a “barrier democracy,” a country in which the vast majority of people have a limited understanding of the words being spoken to them by their Anglophone political, economic, and social leadership. Constantino (1982) believes this problem stems from the continued legacy of the American colonial educational system in the Philippines. When the American government institutionalized education as a military means of solidifying rule over the archipelago, they instituted English as the universal language of instruction. Of course, as Paulet (2007) describes, this was rationalized using the familiar language of American “benevolent assimilation.” “English thus served as a conduit for the transmission of all those ideas of self-government which the attainment of civilization was to prepare the Filipinos to receive. Filipino dialects were incapable of expressing these ideas, just as Indian languages had been” (Paulet, 2007, p. 200.) From the beginning, English was imposed as the language of “civilization,” and to this day it remains the language of instruction in the Philippines beyond grade 2 because “we believe no education can be true education unless it is based on proficiency in English” (Constantino, 1982, 186.)

            The use of the English language in Filipino education, and its role as a status symbol for the Elite, is an example of a broader phenomenon that Andresen (2012) calls “Colonial Mindset.” When a colonized group internalizes the Euro-centric tenants of the oppressor, it can lead to “feelings of shame, embarrassment, or resentment about being a person of his/her ethnicity or culture” (Andresen, 2012, p. 68.) David and Okazaki (2006) claim that these feelings could lead a person from a colonized group to distance themselves from their cultural identity, acting in ways “such as attempting to look and behave like the colonizer and discriminating against others, including people of the same heritage, because they remind the colonized person of his or her inferiority” (David & Okazaki, 2006, p. 242.) I’d argue that this very process is what could lead the modern Filipino Elite to distance themselves from their native languages, which remind them of their “inferiority” as Filipinos. Instead, they cling to the language of the colonial oppressor as a testament to their superiority over the Filipino masses. When the Visayan asked a question in his native language it was more than a statement about his cultural pride– it was an act of defiance against the colonial legacy that the Filipino elite cherishes, and, further, an act of defiance against the perpetrator of that colonial legacy: the person in the room who ceased to understand the conversation as soon as he began talking. Me.

            Again I’d like to end with self-reflection. At TCU when I was talking to a group of students on the sidelines of Christina’s Arnis battle, a couple of them were finding it difficult to understand me. Scrunching up her face with exasperation, a girl named Josephine asked, “don’t you speak any Tagalog?!” I had to say no, and I realized for the first time what that meant. I came to the Philippines without making the slightest attempt at learning the Filipino native language before hand. Because the Philippines is an “English speaking country,” I didn’t even consider that it might be necessary to learn at least basic Tagalog to respect and understand Filipino culture. I’ve been arrogantly walking around, knowing full well that the colonial legacy of my nation means that I can go anywhere and people would be forced to scrunch up their faces and pander to me. Because my language is the language they’ve learned is “civilized,” and deserves respect, I don’t have to spend even an ounce of time or effort learning anything new. And that is an enormous privilege.

From what we've observed, how does the attitude and culture of the Filipino Elite compare to the American Elite that we all know and love?

What needs to change in Filipino society in order for local languages to replace English as the language of pride and prestige? What could that accomplish? What might it look like?

References:

             Andresen, T. (2012). Knowledge construction, transformative academic knowledge, and Filipino American identity and experience, In E. Bonus & D. Maramba, (Eds.) The “other” students: Filipino Americans, education, and power. (pp. 65-87). Charlotte, NC: IAP.

            Constantino, R. (1982). Miseducation of Filipinos. In A.V. Shaw & L. H. Francia, Vestiges of war (pp. 177-192). New York: New York Press. Mangahas, M., & Perez, P. (2016).

            David, E. J. R., & Okazaki, S. (2006). The Colonial Mentality Scale (CMS) for Filipino Americans: Scale construction and psychological implications: A review and recommendation. Journal of Counseling Psychology 53 (1), pp. 1–16. Quimpo, S. (2016).

            Paulet, A. (2007). To change the world: The use of American Indian education in the Philippines. History of Education Quarterly, 47 (2), 173-202.