(Second of Three Parts)

Why didn’t my mother at least warn me that I would be shaken by the things I would uncover if I kept digging into the issue of Whites and people of color? But maybe she didn’t answer me because she couldn’t grasp it herself. And if she, an adult, couldn’t, how could I when I was just a clueless teenager?

She was right. It is hard to understand why the White forefathers of Americans brought Africans to their colonies in North America to be slaves, treated them like animals destined to be sold, punished, taken advantage of, or killed for resisting.

It’s unfathomable how a person’s skin color could give someone else the right to mistreat them. Or why being white gave them the freedom to do whatever they wanted.

            Why? Do White people own the world?

When our Philippine History teacher said that Spain and Portugal once divided the non-European world between them, as if they had split the earth like a piece of fruit, I wondered. They agreed on which parts of the world each country could claim as its own.  He said that, actually, Magellan, who discovered the Philippine archipelago, was a Portuguese who circumnavigated the globe on behalf of Spain.

So, aside from the history of the world, I also began reading more about my nation’s history. I tried to learn more about my country beyond what my elementary teachers taught us in our Social Studies classes.  

However, that only raised more questions than it answered my previous ones. I only got more surprised, sometimes shocked. It wasn’t just the Spanish and Portuguese. The British, French, Germans, and other Europeans, all of whom were white, also joined the scramble. Any land their giant ships could reach and batter with their big guns—they claimed it. Whites ruled the world, enslaving people whose skin color was different from theirs.

Why? The whys kept coming.

We were taught in elementary school that the Spaniards, White people from Europe, colonized us. But I didn’t know then that that was for more than 300 years. Yes, three long centuries.  Then, the British tried to seize the Philippines from them but failed. Eventually, it was America that successfully took us from Spain. What was their justification? If they didn’t take us, the Germans would.

So, were colored countries just toys for white nations to pass around?

People of color, black and brown, were treated like animals by the Whites of the West. Their lands were seized. Their resources were stolen. They were driven to forced labor. Some of them were taken as captives and brought to the home countries of the colonizers to serve as slaves.

Some were deprived of the right to establish their destiny as nations. That’s what the Americans did to my forebears. The Filipinos, who were on the verge of toppling their Hispanic colonizers and starting to exist as a sovereign country, were misled into believing that the US was helping them achieve independence from Spain. It turned out to be wishful thinking. The Americans, in pursuit of their imperial ambitions, took the Philippines away from the Spaniards.

Then, I realized something else about reading. It could steal your innocence. Barely in my teens, I felt like I was already losing the purity and simplicity of my perceptions. Sad to say, I started feeling an animosity towards the Whites, particularly those from the Iberian peninsula, the Spaniards, and those from North America, the cousins of the Brits. I was both hurt and angry when I came to know the cruelty my forefathers suffered at the hands of our colonizers, the Spaniards and the Americans. But I was no longer surprised because those who colonized us were Whites, and my forebears were people of color. If the Americans could not treat their Black countrymen justly and humanely, why would they treat an almost equally dark-skinned people like us differently?

I may be young then, but my heart bled with my forebears who bravely fought the Whites, but to no avail, for the latter were far superior in military strategy and weaponry. It wasn’t fair. The Davids don’t always win against the Goliaths. Most of the time, they lose. If it were a boxing match, the colonized people were flyweights, and their colonizers were heavyweights. It wasn’t a fair fight. Only the people of Haiti were able to successfully expel their colonizer, France, at the height of the colonial period. There were a few other nations that succeeded in driving out colonial forces, but these occurred during the 20th century when colonialism was in decline.

There was a price I had to pay for digging deeper after I saw that photo in my mother’s book. I gave up blissful innocence and traded it for a heartbreaking awareness of the past and a worrisome understanding of its impact on the present. Such consciousness of historical truths was painful and has become a burden, but it was necessary. It was only through knowing these dark chapters of history that I could slowly understand human sufferings brought forth by cruelty and injustice that I never thought human beings could inflict on their fellow men. The loss of my innocence is a victory, bittersweet it may be, but the thought that I could do nothing to stop the cruelty and injustice is painful.

*****

In college, I did my laundry, still following my grandmother’s rule: separate the whites from the coloreds and wash black clothes last.

I continued reading about history, both of the world and my country. I became a more avid student of history. I had more books, especially encyclopedias, at my disposal. The Internet was not yet accessible to everyone at that time. It was in those years of self-study and reading about history that I truly began to see the connections between race, power, and oppression. I discovered more horrifying truths about slavery and colonialism.

As I read more, I learned how colonial powers—British, French, Spanish, and some of their white European cousins—used slavery to fuel their economies, treating Africans as property rather than people. The brutal migration of thousands of enslaved Africans to the Americas was not just a historical fact—it was a system built on the idea that people of color were inferior and expendable.

As I explored further into history, I began to also have a better understanding of the scale of the Holocaust, where the Nazis sought to exterminate millions of Jews, just as other racist systems attempted to erase people of color.  My young mind had found it mightily difficult to comprehend why the Germans had such intense hatred towards the Jews in the same vein that I consider unfathomable the belief of white Americans that they are superior to people of African descent and brown-skinned like me.

I tried to read more about that photo showing a massive pit filled with dead bodies, surrounded by tall, white German soldiers who appeared to be grinning as they looked down at the corpses of the Jews they gassed, peppered with bullets, or allowed to die through starvation and sickness. One of them had a gun pointed at the head of a man on his knees whose eyes reflected resignation to his fate, and I was pretty sure that a few seconds after that picture was taken, a bullet crashed through that man’s skull, and probably died even before his body landed in that pit.

I can’t help but ask why again?

Why did the Germans try to erase from the face of the earth the descendants of Abraham? Is it truly a crime to be born with skin darker than the ideal, whether Black, Brown, or Jewish? I couldn’t understand how their belief in the superiority of the  Aryan race gave them the right to eliminate the people of Israel, whom they believed to be racially inferior.

What makes them consider themselves superior, their white skin? As I pondered the answer,  I couldn’t help but playfully correlate melanin to racism. Could it be that the less melanin in the skin, the more racist a person becomes? Could the more melanin a person has, the more likely they will be oppressed?

There were times when I wanted to stop reading. It made me think that sometimes ignorance felt comforting. As they say, “Ignorance is bliss.” Would it have been better for me not to have chanced upon my mother reading that book and seeing that photo?

But it was too late for me to turn my back on reading. Reading has become an itch that I needed to scratch. It is the drink that quenches my thirst for the answer to the question of why the whites were so cruel and brutal. Why did they see dark-skinned people as less than human, treating them like animals on leashes?

It isn’t comforting to think that the practice of abusing and maltreating a group of people was considered acceptable among the White population. And here, again, are my whys. Why was such treatment of fellow human beings allowed? Why did the society of white people sanction such cruelty?

And what I consider most appalling was the defenders of slavery providing religious justification. Yes, even the Holy Book was used to sort people like garments. Just as white fabrics were given special treatment and black ones were washed last, so too did the disciples of slavery use scripture to divide, dominate, and dehumanize. The Bible, which is supposed to inspire equality and compassion, was instead twisted by those who tried to justify slavery. Slave owners and colonizers clung to verses that appeared to endorse servitude while ignoring the spirit of liberation that is a more compelling theme of the Holy Scriptures.

Yes, slavery was mentioned in the Bible, and even regulated. However, we must remember that the prophets and apostles who wrote these sacred texts were, like us, human beings. They were not infallible. They lived in societies where slavery was the norm, and their words were shaped by the flawed realities of their time. Blindly accepting slavery as morally permissible just because it existed in scripture is to confuse description with prescription and culture with divine command.

The more profound message of scripture, primarily through Christ, is one of love, justice, and human dignity. That message was silenced by those who preferred “Slaves, obey your masters” over “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Faith was weaponized. In the hands of slave masters, the  Bible, became not a source of hope but a whip. And those who used it to subjugate others were not spreading the gospel. They were staining it.

Why didn’t the Whites chose to love their dark-skinned neighbors? What have people of color done to them to deserve such hatred? Why were they dehumanized? Why did White people perpetuate the inhuman system of slavery for centuries? I continued reading to find answers to the many questions I had. I wanted to understand the psychological mechanism of slavery and its lingering effect on the ongoing systems of racism and inequality. I tried to find the roots of the hatred that Caucasians harbor toward people of color.

The more I uncovered in my readings, the more I realized that understanding the roots of such hatred of the Aryans toward dark-skinned people was not just about finding answers; it was about understanding the complexities of human nature. It was about confronting the darkness of human history and understanding its unshakable grip on the present.

And as I continued through the pages of both our nation’s history and that of the world, I kept repeating one question:

WHY?

Why is it that in every photo that struck me, there were always fair-skinned, tall people standing triumphantly or towering over dead bodies of people with colored skin?

Why were American soldiers even photographed, smiling, hands on their hips,  at the edge of a mass grave filled with the bodies of brown-skinned Filipino Muslims whom they massacred at Bud Dajo in Sulu?

It would’ve made sense, although not morally justifiable, if they had only killed soldiers or warriors. But they included helpless women and children. You can even see in the photo dead women with their breasts exposed. Didn’t those American soldiers in the photo and their commanding officers have no sisters, wives, aunts, mothers, or grandmothers? Why did those American soldiers do it? Was it because my forebears were dark-skinned and thus didn’t deserve to live?

Then I unearthed more photos, those of dead colored people again, including children and women, massacred in Shaperville in South Africa. They belonged to the group that protested against the restriction on movement imposed upon them. Reports had it that they were sprayed with bullets by the White police who belonged to the White government that subjected their non-white compatriots to political, social, and economic discrimination.

It made me wonder if the Apartheid that the Whites in South Africa implemented was inspired by the segregation scheme that the white Americans used against their colored compatriots. It appeared to be so. Similar to what their fellow Whites did in America, the White supremacist government of South Africa declared certain areas as white-only zones, forcibly relocating colored families to slum areas far from their schools and workplaces. Who wouldn’t protest?

I saw no difference between the images of the Holocaust and those of the massacres at Bud Dajo and Sharpeville. All displayed the same cruelty that humans can inflict on one another. And I couldn’t help but notice that the perpetrators in these cases were fair-skinned, blinded by their belief in white supremacy, while their victims were dark-skinned souls.

Why does history repeat itself? Why, in every conflict, in every atrocity, do the perpetrators so often share the same trait—whiteness—and their victims, a common heritage of darkness?

What about the abuses of the South African white government during the implementation of apartheid? What about the abuses committed by the Americans when they colonized my nation? What about the atrocities committed by other colonizers in the countries they occupied during the colonization period?

Ah, there’s a legal technicality, they say. Something called the Genocide Convention — the act of genocide is only considered a crime if committed after 1948. So, it’s too bad for the people of color who were victimized before the world decided to classify such things as illegal, immoral, and criminal.

What about the guilty parties in the implementation of Apartheid in South Africa? That was after 1948, right? While some individuals were reportedly prosecuted, the larger question of criminal accountability for apartheid-era crimes remains a complex and unresolved issue in that country.

*****

Then, I became a teacher and eventually got married.  The laundry was no longer my concern. My wife did it, and she was just as meticulous as my grandmother was with the fabrics.  She treated the whites delicately and ensured that the colored ones were strictly separated.

During my first year of teaching, aside from English, I was elated when our High School principal assigned me the courses of Philippine History and World History. These courses seemed drawn to me. Even when I eventually moved to a tertiary institution, I would be assigned those courses. Slavery, colonialism, racism, and other related constructs would always come knocking at my doors. Strangely enough, even when I taught at the Graduate School level, I found my way back to history when I was asked to teach Southeast Asian studies.  And what’s the common denominator among Southeast Asian countries? They were all colonized by the Whites, except for Thailand. There was no place in the world that the Caucasians from  North America and Europe did not include in their collection of trophies. Every country they successfully invade is a trophy.

I taught History passionately, and whenever the subjects of slavery, colonialism, and racial discrimination were discussed, either as the main topics or as related topics, I became like a man possessed. I poured out all the thoughts and feelings I had been carrying in this writing.

I argued with my students that there is a need for the countries of the civilized world to convene again in Geneva and once and for all create laws intended to address the abuses committed by imperial forces during colonial times in countries they occupied by force.

The Fabrics of Race (3)

The Fabrics of Race (1)