Black Star

I was glued to the internet all morning watching the live updates of the tallies. It was a Wednesday morning here in the Philippines, and at around 9:30 AM I was dead-certain that Obama will be the next U.S. president.

Being the only person in the office who followed the campaigns, I announced the result forcefully, “Obama is gonna win!”

My coworker gave a curious reply, “Really? America will take a turn for the worse then.”

I paused uneasily, and then wondered aloud what he meant. He said, “That country can now be governed by a black man. It means Negroes will be freer to roam the streets to do their thugs stuff.”

I was not in the mood to debate with anyone, so without challenging him I let him had his hateful speculations. Even if I couldn’t blame him for being ignorant, those comments did not sit well with me. My brother, also living in the Philippines, had been in a similar position few months ago when he and his coworkers watched the trailers of Resident Evil 5. While my brother found the images of a white hero shooting black zombies in Africa distasteful, his coworker commented, “Well there are many black terrorists anyway.”

Here’s a background of how black people are regarded here in the Philippines, a country that worships America and will follow it to the ends of the earth. Our country cannot be blamed for being a big fan of America because when Americans ruled our land many years ago, they gave us, among other things, industrial and economic developments. Above all, they earned favorable opinions from us because on July 4, 1946, they allowed us to be an independent nation.

The year is 1946. This was before Americans had the civil rights act. Racial divide was rampant at their side. From this, we can conclude that Americans did not educate Filipinos properly about what black people were like, because even Americans themselves couldn’t see black people for who they were individually. Although blacks, Negritos specifically, were the first to populate our country hundreds of years ago, they had long become a minority here, being settled in our most isolated and undeveloped regions. The average Filipinos did not congregate with blacks too much, so we did not know them too well.

To this day it is not very common for us to see blacks. Most of our immigrants are Chinese, Hispanics, Caucasians, and Koreans. Most of us only see black people through movies, or if live then only through local basketball leagues where they play as imports. Many of us don’t even know who Martin Luther King, Jr. is.

Until now, the media have never been known to represent blacks favorably. Often in Hollywood movies, black people were paid to play the throwaway loud and comic roles, while the whites are the heroes saving the world (see: Transformers). Meanwhile, in hiphop music videos, we don’t see black men conduct themselves in the cleanest ways because we see them glorifying life of hookers, blingblings, and gangbangings. It doesn’t help that the contents of their lyrics are on the explicit side.

To be sure, the media are to be faulted for their propensity to portray blacks in negative lights. Do they sing praises to civil rights activists as much as they would criticize gangster rappers? Do they commend Toni Morrison’s literary achievements as often as they would condemn OJ Simpson’s crimes? Even the black people’s songs they play are selective: instead of choosing the heaps of intelligent raps, soul and rnb music that dominate the underground scenes, it’s the Souljah Boyz’s who get all the airtime, ululating “ho” so that holier-than-thou soccer moms can slam Biblical wisdoms onto them. There’s something to be said about music industries being too obsessed with images of badness and cockiness, yet how often does anyone condemn the white race when a band of white guys acts like punks?

Indeed certain blacks, just like certain people of other ethnic groups, are up to no good. Indeed the ghetto life can be gruesome. Yet, rarely has any efforts to understand what made those happen ever reached public awareness. Furthermore, there has yet to be enough proof, 68 years later, that what happened Richard Wright’s Native Son does not happen anymore on modern times: when its black protagonist Bigger Thomas faced charges of murdering a white woman, white people treated the trial as the prosecution of the entire black community. And this is exactly what’s happening here: my coworker is unable to perceive black personalities as individuals, and instead judges the whole black race through media’s oblique expositions.

There still are long ways to go if racism is to be driven permanently out of existence, but electing Obama as president is the start for Americans. They showed the world that they are ready to make an African-American become the world’s most powerful man. If indeed change is gonna come is anyone’s guess, but just as it behooves Obama to make America more peaceful by cultivating it as a land that treats diverse groups fairly, it behooves us all – including the rest of the world - to remove our ignorance.