Privilege in the Context of History

Privilege is often considered in terms of who does not benefit from privilege rather than who does benefit. As McIntosh (1988) describes in her work “White privilege and male privilege,” “privilege simply confers dominance, gives permission to control, because of one’s race or sex;” furthermore, “such ‘privilege’ may be widely desired without being in any way beneficial to the whole society” (p. 101). Through this statement, she addresses the dismissal that people with privilege often demonstrate when confronted with the term privilege, though the term also carries a loaded connotation that is advantageous and favorable.

A classroom discussion topic I saw privilege manifested in was education about Filipino history. My classmates were asked what history they learned in the American education system. The general consensus was most Filipino history was condensed into a paragraph or two in textbooks that often painted the Filipinos as savage, uncivilized, and uneducated. Up until this week in the program, I felt confused why I was not familiar with any of Filipino history we were introduced to. In McIntosh’s (1988) observations about her own White privilege, she identifies this as being able to “easily find academic courses and institutions that give attention only to people of [her] race” (p. 100). I have this privilege which is why I and others are undereducated about non-White history or even unfavorable White history. It was not until reading Zinn’s (2008) piece on benevolent assimilation that I recognized a piece of history that I had been introduced to in high school, which was Felipe Agoncillo being ignored at the Paris Peace Talks as seen in Figure 1 below (p. 62). Even so, it was a sentence in a history textbook written by White people for White people that was not meant to truly be remembered or found significant.

Figure 1. An illustration published in the Washington Post describing how the Americans treated Felipe Agoncillo at the Paris Peace Talks.

Two other readings by Ileto and Twain also describe the White privilege exhibited by American colonials in the Philippines. Starting with Twain’s (2002) “To the person sitting in the darkness,” Twain utilizes satire in order to convey his purpose of revealing that the American’s benevolent assimilation is no different than how the Spanish occupied the Philippines. His use of satire was perhaps an attempt to reach out to other White-privileged people in order to gain support for the end of the occupation of the Philippines, since what he wrote sounded at first eerily similar to the American leaders at the time such as Colonel Gardener who claimed America should “say to the nations of Europe hands off, this is our foster-child, a republic in Asiatic waters” (Ileto, 1998, p. 5). I considered that Twain’s satire could have swayed the minds of the more moderate White people who might have began to see the irony of their horror towards European colonization yet support of American assistance in the Philippines.

The second reading, Ileto’s “The Philippine-American War, Friendship and Forgetting,” made me consider another aspect of White privilege in Filipino history. In his article, Ileto (1998) compares the occupation by the Americans to that of the Japanese (p. 13). In one example, he explains that researchers struggled to collect accounts of the Philippine-American War and instead were presented with “accounts of the atrocities, reconcentration, interrogation, and so forth…attributed to the Japanese invaders (Ileto, 1998, p. 13). The history of American occupation has quickly been forgotten compared to later invasion by the Japanese, perhaps due to the Japanese being a seemingly clear enemy whereas the Americans presented themselves as friends or advisors. I consider this a demonstration of White privilege within the context of historical accountability. Furthermore, the identification of anti-U.S. positioning as one of the six anti-elite political spaces opened by President Duterte as defined by Carmel Abao at the Doing Digong: Politics in the Wake of EDSA talk just confirms that this White privilege is still prevalent in the Philippines.

The last aspect of privilege I would like to touch on is male privilege. McIntosh (1988) connects male privilege to White privilege by saying that “whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege” (p. 95). I felt like this was a powerful topic in our group discussion, especially when relating White privilege to male privilege. To express my ideas, I sketched a scenario as seen below in Figure 2 between a man and a woman that I have experienced that I shared during the discussion. The same was said better by another student, Nicole Harris, who stated that women do not want allies when it comes to fighting male privilege—we want people to stand in solidarity, not just to understand what struggles we face but to stand up for us when we face them. The same can be universally applied to other privileges people are suppressed by.

Figure 2. A quick sketch of a scenario where an ally may not always be in solidarity.

References

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

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

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: Metropolitan Books.