On Racism and Prejudice
I used to be somewhat active in this area. I was once part of the Multi-Cultural Center of my college and we dealt with issues of racial prejudice... we constantly argued against stereotypes and tried to break many of them by increasing the awareness of the "common folk" on campus.

For the Filipino club, this largely dealt with telling people where the Philippines was, how to spell Philippines and Filipino, explain that we don't live in the jungle ("Most of us don't, really! Not that there's anything wrong with that..."), and serve them food.

Filipinos tend to be an invisible minority in the U.S. How often have I gotten the "what ARE you again?" because after a few years I had a fairly decent American accent and command of slang... and was well-versed on American pop culture? So often that I took it for granted.

To be honest, I never really went too much into the "Pinoy Pride" bit. I was Filipino and... so what? When I grew up here in the Philippines... so was everyone else.

And perhaps that's why I never understood racism. Coming from the Philippines, the skin color thing never made sense because I saw the whole range of pigmentation and it never made that much difference. People could be angels or @$$holes regardless of the skin color.

It's about culture. It's about mores and norms that you value and how they greatly they differ with the guy (or gal) next to you. Are those differences big enough to hate for? To fight for? To kill for?

It's about protectionism. Us against them. They're taking our jobs. They're destroying our way of life. They're evil, and we're good. Inherently good. We deserve this.

Sound familiar? You've heard similar phrases here in the taxi cabs and streets of Metro Manila. Only in the Philippines, it's not really about race... is it? It's a tribal mentality... but tribes are defined by political and financial allegiances, by social classes, by ideology, by survival...