Overview

Featured Image: Carnivores on Session Road by Santiago Bose | 2002, Esther and Biddy Que Collection

One can dedicate many lives to studying the intersection of race, class, and colonialism. Before delving into this topic any further, it is necessary to understand that Spanish colonialism fundamentally changed the entire social structure of the Philippines. Simply put, the conceptions that the Spaniards had of race completely and insidiously transformed an already-developed caste system that governed the archipelago. Race is a social construct that thrives off the idea of essentialism. Whiteness is associated with civility, modernity, development, and beauty. Meanwhile, blackness/brownness is associated with savagery, barbarity, danger, and ugliness. One’s skin color and their family determined their station in life. Those with Spanish blood governed while those of indigenous blood were suppressed and brainwashed into thinking that they were inferior. This mindset still persists today. As women were always the main targets of colonial racialization, they are now creating movements to fight back against the mestizo beauty standards that caused them to be ashamed of themselves. In this section, one must not hold any expectation of truly understanding race in the Philippines. This intricate and age-old topic is one that inspires us to think deeper about the formation of identities and the power some have over others.

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Supplementary Sources:

Why ‘White is Beautiful’ Among Filipinos

What’s the Ideal Beauty Standard in the Philippines?

Race as Praxis in the Philippines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Dangerous intercourse: race, gender and interracial relations in the American colonial Philippines, 1898 – 1946

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