Revolution in my Blood

Anthony Pascual

You never stop learning. That is the mantra I have lived by as I have gone through my own learning process. There is the sense that I have always understood this phrase - that there will always be more to learn. In another sense, however, this saying has expanded. It is not just that there is always more to learn, but that you truly never stop learning because every moment in your life is some kind of learning opportunity.

Knowledge is not just simply ascertained in particular moments. How one can come to learn can always continually be expanding in such a way where learning can be accomplished through any given experience. What is necessary in expanding one’s learning is a kind of awareness that allows for learning to happen.

As we begin to make ourselves more aware, our awareness allows us to see and understand what is truly out there in the world. Awareness leads us to find truths and in doing so we can come to find out more about the world at play and how we each fit into this process. This is in some sense the process of knowledge that Banks (1996) describes in referring to how we are positioned to the world - “positionality means that important aspects of our identity, for example, our gender, our race, our class, our age . . . are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities” (p. 6). Our knowledge comes from how we relate to the structures in the world and the continuing of our awareness to these structures is how we construct each truth. To always learn, that is, to never stop learning, we must constantly go through the process of making ourselves aware of our positioning to the world.

So then, through this program, I have come to ask myself about my learning, that is, what have I come to know through my positioning in the world. What I have come to know is based in how I’ve made myself aware of my positioning to the world. In this program, I have put myself and been put into places where I had to be aware of my current positioning. As a male, brown skinned Filipino American in particular my learning is grounded in what it means to be a part of these systems that make me who I am - particularly with gender, race, ethnicity.

As we toured the Rizal shrine, towards the end I found myself taking the same walk as the eponymous Jose Rizal took as he met his death. Rizal was not my national hero. I could never see an unarmed writer as a true revolutionary. Yet in taking that walk, I had come to feel a speck of what was felt at the end of that gate - his death. What I felt in his death was that he died in the same way any revolutionary Filipino did - he died for the Filipino.

As a Filipino American, I am distanced from my history, my culture, and my identity. “Colonization positioned the Filipino American identity in the first stage of Banks’ Stages of Cultural Identity, which is cultural psychological captivity” (Andresen 2012, p. 77). Whatever it meant to be Filipino has been stripped away through a constant saturating of the culture as a result of colonization. Yet in spite of this saturation process, I still hold steadfastly that I am Filipino. Even more so, I will continue to pass on this Filipino blood even as it becomes more saturated through further generational gaps from its native origins of my ancestors. When Rizal and martyrs like him died for the sake of the Filipino, what exactly did he die for?

The history of the Filipino is filled with those dying for its preservation in spite of its continued saturation. Rizal wrote about the Filipino and pride for being Filipino and what he showed for it was his death. At this point, Filipino-ness, whatever it is that makes us Filipino, is something far too distant for me to ever truly know, but that is part of what it means for me to be Filipino. It is the question I will never be able to answer, but one I will always be asking and an answer I will always be seeking. It is why many have died for the Filipino, because we are constantly learning what it means to be Filipino. Part of what it means to be Filipino is its preservation and its preservation entails this eternal struggle to learn the Filipino and eventually we come to die in our attempts to preserve it.

What there is for the Filipino is its survival. This is something that exists in all Filipinos - then, now, and the for the future. When I go through the Rizal shrine, when I hear the history of the Philippines from Lapu Lapu to People Power, these are not just simply historical relics for my own personal learning. My learning is positioned to being Filipino American.

What these are is something that is part of the much greater preservation of the Filipino. My learning is not what I personally learn about Filipinos my learning comes from the fact that I am just a part of what it means to be Filipino. As I learn, as I continue to exist, as bits of Filipino history pop up and I come to hear about these things, I am participating in the much greater structure of the preserving of the Filipino. To be Filipino means to be a part of its survival. So when I learn, I’m doing so as a Filipino American and my learning is to continue its preservation.

My learning comes in not just my personal gaining of knowledge, but in how I exist in a greater learning structure. My existence then is defined in how I’m positioned, which as I explained before is much defined by my existence as a Filipino American. In this program, I was also put into various group dynamics and having to become more aware of my position in the world in how I interact with others. My learning then comes also in the form of how I as a male-brown skinned Filipino American interact with other people positioned with their own identities.

In both groups I was in, I was the only male in either group. Nicole Harris, a dark-skinned woman, was in both my groups and I also was grouped with Brynn, a white woman, and Ruby, a Native American woman. These interactions brought challenges mostly dealing with my place as the privileged male. This is dangerous in an academic setting and my hope to be aware of it was an integral part of this learning process. Peggy McIntosh (1988) writes on privilege as one that “confers dominance, gives permission to control, because of one’s race or sex” (p. 101). What I had to be aware of was that within an academic setting where control is within the hands of White men, that being a man of color was to be part of varying power dynamics where I could be in a vulnerable state or in a state of dominance.

Simultaneously, I was learning what it meant to be a man in these setting but what it meant to also be brown in these settings. At times I could be overstepping into the conversation and as a man be controlling of the whole process. At other times, I could be feeling as if my part in the system was invalidated by virtue of my skin color. We could always try to make conscious efforts to not exert our privileges, such as not speaking over women as I did try to do in the group, but this is not enough.

The reality is that our existence is defined by our preset positions in life. I can try to not exert my privileges, but my privilege preexists myself and thus will always be there in some way. Likewise, my vulnerabilities as a brown skinned man will always be there in some way. The reason people may dismiss my claims may not always be because I’m some angry brown man, but the system that positions my feelings as coming from an angry brown man is always there.

The way I think the groups I was in coexisted was simply through the awareness of the systems at play. We spoke on what we were feeling and where it was coming from as it pertained to our positions in life. We made aware the privileges and vulnerabilities that came with each of us and in turn, this also sets us up to make us more aware. It is not a process without discomfort or conflict.

There will exist times where privilege comes up and vulnerabilities will be taken advantage of. It is our job to stick with the discomfort and keep on listening and validating the diversity of experiences that exist within the world. To affirm existence is to affirm that all kinds of knowledge and identities exist. Doing so will naturally create conflict, but conflict is all part of the learning process and this awareness will in turn lead to an understanding of all the knowledge that does in fact exist.

To be frank, something that did help with this process was the relationship I had with Gaby during this trip. I’m a brown-skinned man and she’s a light skinned, mixed woman. Power dynamics were constantly always at play. My experiences and the way I saw things were shaped in large part to my own male privilege. There were also times where we conflicted because of the presentation of me as a brown man, where the meaning of what it means to be brown presents a certain representation of who I am to people.

We constantly put each other at points where we were uncomfortable, but we forced each other to listen to where we were coming from. To be uncomfortable in the face having your own personal knowledge and identity challenged is to learn more about how I exist and how others exist in their identities. I learned a lot of what it means to be a brown man by being with a light skinned woman. It is a case of examining privilege where it exists and affirming that these systems do in fact exist even when they do seem to conflict.

My learning does not end. What comes out of this trip is not answers, but more questions. I have come to see that the answers will most likely never come to me, but my existence is defined not in the answer itself but in the quest for it. My existence is part of a greater structure that defines me as who I am, particularly that I’m a Filipino American. Being a Filipino American means that I am always fighting to learn and preserve who I am. Revolution and survival is in my blood. The survival of the Filipino, however, comes with it a learning process that entails the affirming of a diversity of existences. So, revolution is not just the preservation of my own blood, but the preservation and emergence of other identities. For me as a brown skinned Filipino man, a true revolution must also allow for the preservation of the knowledge and identity that comes with being a woman, queer, transgender, lower class, handicapped, colonized, etc. To learn is to survive the Filipino and learning means to affirm the existence of all peoples.

References

Banks, J.A. (1996). Multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action. New York: Teachers College 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.

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.