Umay uling! A comment we often hear from people who are so keen in marginalizing others with dark skin tones. They seem to feel some sort of superiority as if skin is the only criterion of becoming a respectable human being.
Miss Universe Canada 2020 Nova Stevens has revealed that she had been getting racist comments online. On May 4, 2021, Nova shared a photo of herself filled with screen shots of negative comments which were in Tagalog. Some of the comments on her photo, which included English translations, were “nognog (‘N words’),” “katakot (scary),” “akala ko engkanto (‘I thought she was a ghost’),” “over well done ang chicken, charge sa grill man (‘burnt chicken’),” and “tostadong tostado na nga nasunog pa (‘she is toasted and burned’),” among other disrespectful remarks (gmanetwork.com).
This caused alarm to some Filipinos especially those who have understood that beauty is not about skin color and that bigotry is a result of IGNORANCE.
Bigotry is the fact of having and expressing strong, unreasonable beliefs and disliking other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life. The Oxford dictionary defines it as an obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
Ignorance on the other hand is defined as a lack of knowledge, education or understanding. But with the technological advancements these days and the exposure to the internet, one might wonder why there are some people who choose to IGNORE realities. Of course, there is a genetic factor we can consider since there are biological foundations of intelligence and some theorists believe that “there is no such thing as brain transfer”. But with the advent of development psychology and the nurture theory, we still cannot grasp why there are bigots out there.
Stephanie Fulton (2017) wrote: Do you ever feel like your audience isn’t buying what you are presenting? Or no matter how you present the information, they don’t believe you? Maybe it’s not your presentation that’s the problem, but it’s your audience’s inability to understand your perspective. Your audience members could be experiencing something known as motivated ignorance.
Motivated ignorance can be simply defined as when people don’t want to know the facts. While ignorance is defined as a lack of knowledge, education or understanding; motivated ignorance is when others choose not to educate themselves.
So why such obsession on skin color among the Filipinos? Limos (2019) said that the obsession with fairer skin is related to how the national psyche was shaped by colonial powers who relegated brown-skinned indios to lower class citizens, and elevated the white-skinned insulares, peninsulares, and mestizos to the nobilility. Together, they formed a class of pure- and half-blood Spaniards living in the Philippines.
For 300 years, indios were made to fawn over nobility, to the point of idealizing them and desiring to be like them. Jose Rizal very accurately depicted in his Noli Me Tangere novel this symptom in the character of Doña Victorina de Espadaña – a brown-skinned Filipino woman who pretended to be a Spanish mestiza, who wore heavy white makeup, and spoke very broken Castilian to the point of hilarity.
With this mindset, whitening products became marketing giants in our country. But couldn’t one transcend from his colonized past through the continuum of learning at present?
“With all that has been going on in the world, ‘black lives matter,’ ‘Asians are human,’ you would think this would bring us together. Instead, it looks like some people are still stuck in their ignorant and racist ideologies,” said Nova Stevens in here Instagram account.
Instead of looking into the color of others’ skin, why not focus on questions like: Why am I wearing clothes which can spontaneously combust? Or: what would I say when Rudyard Kipling asks me to narrate a scene out of my favorite story?
But bigots don’t care about dye from endangered trees and products being tested on animals. Worse, they do not even know who Kipling is. They continue to consume products that promise to make their skin fairer and face the consequences of sunburn evident on their scarred facial skin. (This is a tropical country for crying out loud!)
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