"Civilization"

As a class we were visited by urban activist, Susan Quimpo (2016). Quimpo has spent her life working for social justice in the Philippines. As a young woman Quimpo participated in street theater as a form of resistance to the Marcos dynasty in the 1980’s. The coupling of vast inequalities for Filipinos and the Duterte presidency has kept Quimpo busy every since. Revision of historical accounts is one many lingering effects from the American colonization from the early 1900s. Quimpo said she is partnering with other organizations around Manila to interrupt the cycle of historical revisionism by short informational and creative videos. In those videos she shares true accounts of what took place during the Marcos regime wherein Marcos enacted Martial Law. While the much of the country lived in harsh conditions, the Marcos’s lived a lifestyle beyond ostentatious. (Quimpo, 2016).

Revising history, or “burying the past” (Ileto, 1998) is a tactic of colonization that is influenced by white and male privilege. When histories are left out or forgotten it is then easier for a settler state to advance their agenda in a foreign site. That agenda includes assimilation, which is related to white and male privilege. McIntosh quotes E. Minnich saying that “whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us”. (McIntosh, 1988).  That sort of disconnection is paramount in the process of assimilation, whereby a gap in the memory of a collective actually expedites the process of hegemonic tutelage – a goal set out by President McKinley in the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation in 1898 (Zinn, 2008).

“Burying the past” disconnects and makes invisible the narratives and experiences of  Indigenous Peoples (IP) of the Philippines as well. For non-indigenous peoples to be able to claim land, IP must disappear. By making IP people disappear they are dehumanized and furthermore it becomes acceptable to occupy their land as their own. (Smith, 2015). The idea of making IP disappear serves colonialist efforts and upholds the white supremacy and heteropatriarchy systems that makes imperialism possible. In addressing the question: “Who are the people of the Philippines and how as that changed over time?” (Mangahas and Perez, 2016) our guest speakers grappled with the politics of recognition (Coulthard, 2007). In Coulthard’s politics of recognition the colonized seek recognition in order to gain the socioeconomic benefits that typically come along with governmental tutelage. By petitioning to the dominating state the social hierarchy of the colonizers, wherein indigenous people must assimilate or be taken out, is reinforced.

We can connect this notion to the way Ileto explains how circumstance can lead to surrender, he recounts the way Bernardo Marques discussed his and general Filipino surrender at that end of the Philippine -American War in 1902: “They surrendered for various things: some because they were tired of staying in the fields; some through fear and because they lost hope; because some of them had been injured or lost their health through life in the field: and some because their families obliged them to surrender.” (Ileto, 1998) A contemporary site where Filipinos have been lead to surrender through the effects of colonization is in urban informal settlements. Urban informal settlements are places where people who lack “formal” education and “formal” work experience make their lives (Gonzales, 2016). Forced by circumstance young women and children engage in prostitution as it empowers them with an income that they cannot find elsewhere. (Gonzales, 2016).

Twain asks in his article To The Person Sitting in Darkness “Can we afford civilization?” (Twain, 2002). I ask: how are we and has civilization been defined and used? Who has defined it? Is civilization being defined from a place of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy? On a class outing we visited the site of former Filipino Revolutionary and first President of the post-Spanish colonial rule Emilio Aguinaldo. As a symbol of gratitude to the Americans the colors of the Filipino flag reflect the colors of the American flag – a flag that in my opinion has been exhausted in its promotion of an idea of “civilization”.

Little girl outside of Aguinaldo Shrine

Works Cited:

Coulthard, G. S. (2007). Subjects of empire: Indigenous peoples and the ‘politics of recognition’in Canada. Contemporary Political Theory, 6(4), 437-460.

Gonzales, C. (2016, July 28). Urban Informal Settlers. Lecture presented in Philippines, Manila.

Ileto, R.C. (1998). The Philippine-American War, Friendship and Forgetting. In Shaw, A.V. & Francia, L.H. Vestiges of war. (pp. 3-21)

Mangahas, M.  and Perez, P. (2016, July 28). Indigenous Peoples. Lecture presented in Philippines, Manila.

McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see the correspondences through work in women’s studies. In K. Tupper, Introduction to women’s studies: Women 200 (2^nd ed.) (pp.62-71). New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Quimpo, S. (2016, July 27). Martial Law. Lecture presented in Philippines, Manila.

Smith, A. (2015). Heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of white supremacy: Rethinking women of color organizing. Transformations: Feminist Pathways to Global Change, 264.

Twain, M. (2002). To the person sitting in darkness. In Shaw, A.V. & Francia, L.H. Vestiges of War (pp. 57-68). New York: New York Press.

Zinn, H. (2008). Invasion of the Philippines. In A people’s history of American empire. (pp. 53-72) NY: Metropol