Good lord I’d like to recite my debate speech about how colonization fucked everything up.
1) Colonization is the direct cause of colorism in the Philippines.
It’s all rooted back to how the Spaniards differentiated us by putting us into categories according to skin tone. Lighter Filipinxs got better *house* jobs and darker Filipinxs got the hard outside labor.
2) It was the genocide of our culture and writing system.
Baybayin was the lost pre-colonial writing system before Spain. By the time Spain came, they were surprised at how we could read and write. Men and women.
Know what that means? It was more of an egalitarian society.
But oh no. We are just savages who lived in the jungle before the white saviors came.
3) The Philippines has been constantly exploited for over 500 years.
We’ve been colonized over and over and over again. Taken for our location and our resources. They made us hate our skin, hate our culture, and embrace everything that is white.
I need to make a longer post about this cause arguments like this really piss me the fuck off cause the more I read up on this topic, the more I realize how much the root cause of racism and colorism stems from colonization.
And the self-hate is passed down from generation to generation. You will get treated better if you’re light-skinned. Pale is beautiful. Brown is ugly.
This is something we’re told and grow up seeing and it’s all because some fucking white assholes imposed that on us.
We barely know any of our history cause it was all wiped out and forgotten. They didn’t do shit to help us.
They exploited us.
-Leah
colonialism also destroyed our queerness.
pre-colonial and early colonial accounts of spanish priests described third-sex culture and gender crossers in almost all regions of the Philippines. in general they were called “binabae” (feminine man) and “binalake” (masculine woman). Tagalogs called these people “bayog,” the Central Bisayas “bayot/bayok.” Eastern Bisayans “asog,” Western Bisayas “agi-ngin/agi”, and Mindanaoans “bantut.” they were spiritual leaders and shamans in their communities, known as baylan or catalonan or anitera. there is also the “silahis,” those who are attracted to male and female sexes. sometimes they also identify as third-sex, but it is not a prerequisite.
an account from the 16th-century Manila Manuscript,
or boxer codex,
goes: “[They] are priests dressed in female
garb. […] Almost all are impotent for the reproductive act, and thus they marry
other males and sleep with them as man and wife and have carnal knowledge.”
in the 1668 book “Historia de los Islas y Indios
de Bisayas,” the asog were described
as “…impotent men and deficient for the practice of matrimony, considered
themselves more like women than men in their manner of living or going about,
even in their occupations…”
colonialism destroyed these gender identities and sexual orientations. it warped these terms for third-sex people so that they are now insults and slurs. for example, the Tagalog word bayog is also the name of a kind of bamboo, signifying the bending or crossing of gender and sex. over the centuries, bayog turned into the word bakla, a word that also meant ‘confused’ and ‘cowardly.’
sources: Male Homosexuality in the Philippines: a short history, by J. Neil C. Garcia. 2004. https://iias.asia/sites/default/files/IIAS_NL35_13.pdf
Beauty and Power:
Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines, by Mark Johnson. 1997.
Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM, by J. Neil C. Garcia. 1996.