Talking About Racism

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The first Positively Filipino webinar on "Racism and the Filipino American" took place last Monday with two speakers, Dr. Michael Gonzalez, an anthropologist and history professor, and Atty. Bill Tamayo, a civil rights lawyer and commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Myke Gonzalez focused on Philippine colonial history, elaborating on how the Spanish colonizers' social stratification strategy in managing its Asian colony, and the American administrations' classification of Philippine residents according to skin color enabled the Filipino mentality that considers white/fair skin superior to darker tones.

Bill Tamayo traced the  roots of white supremacy in the US, an eye-opening narrative on how for hundreds of years since the slave trade began, and even after the Civil War was fought and slaves freed, it was actually legal to treat Blacks as sub-human. White supremacy was protected by law!

We will be posting these lectures in Positively Filipino and YouTube soon. Watch out for the announcements.

Meanwhile, the second webinar "A Difficult Conversation" which should answer the one question that is in everyone's minds in this historical moment of #BlackLivesMatter: how do we talk to Filipinos who harbor strongly held attitudes against Blacks?

I hope you join us on July 13.

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Gemma Nemenzo

Editor, Positively Filipino