Category Archives: Week 1
“Collaboration, Co-Prosperity, and ‘Complete Independence’: Across the Pacific (1942), across Philippine Palimpsests” by Victor Bascara
“A Wonderous World of Small Places: Childhood Education, US Colonial Biopolitics, and the Global Filipino” Kim Alidio
“Filipino Settlements in the United States,” Yen Le Espiritu
Philippine Society and Revolution (PSR)
Get PSR here.
This text is a foundational text to the national democratic movement of the Philippines. It provides a great activist analysis of Philippine society and a program of what is to be done given that analysis.
3 Basic Problems (of the Philippines)
Here’s a creative rendition of a core concept in Amado Guerrero’s “Philippine Society and Revolution”
Black History is Our [Filipino] History
Carter G. Woodson & Thomasite Pedagogy
[Published 2003 in the Filipino American Herald. Black History is Our History by Freedom Allah Siyam]
In February of 1926, the “Father of Black History” Carter Godwin
Woodson organized the first Negro History Week in Washington, D.C.,
which would later become national Black History Month in the 1960’s.
An interesting fact about Woodson’s achievements is that upon
completion of his Bachelors degree he taught and served as a
supervisor in the Philippine public schools between 1903 and 1907.
This means that Carter G. Woodson was of the 600 U.S. teachers shipped
to the Philippines to indoctrinate Filipinos through a curriculum
established to miseducate Filipinos. The curriculum consisted of
teaching American history, about American heroes, American patriotic
songs, and the teaching of English which would further divide the
population of the Philippines along the lines of the learned and the
un-learned. Above all, the curriculum placed an emphasis on White
Supremacy and non-white inferiority by propagating the fallacy that
Filipinos were unfit for self-government and that the Americans were
there to civilize them reach that degree of intelligence and ability.
The Filipino people were hoodwinked while America raped and pillaged
the Philippines for its bountiful natural resources to fuel America’s
industries.
Through his travels and experiences Woodson developed an enhanced
philosophy of History. He understood that History is not just a mere
collection of facts, but must be developed to a higher understanding
of the social conditions and contexts of those facts. And with the
observation of those conditions an historian must arrive at a
reasonable interpretation of those facts. After assessing his life and
developing his research on Black history, Carter G. Woodson wrote The
Mis-Education of the Negro (1933). In which he stated: “When you
control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.
You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will
find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it.”
Although this fact cannot be traced in the works of Woodson, it can be
hypothesized that it was Woodson’s direct participation and
observation in the American miseducation process in the Philippines
that led him to his understanding of the miseducation of black
communities in America. And even though it was the miseducation of
Blacks, Natives and poor whites in America that provided the framework
for the miseducation of Filipinos, it took Woodson a journey 8,000
miles outside of the racist conditions of America, to see how the
education system cultivated the cultural training and conditioning –
not the education – of non-people who have suffered the exploitive and
oppressive conditions of slavery, colonization and imperialism.
Woodson saw that America’s legacy of domination facilitated a
psychology of slavery in the descendants of enslaved Africans here in
America.
Woodson’s remarkable book was obviously an inspiration to Filipino
historian Renato Constantino when he wrote The Miseducation of the
Filipino (1982), in which Constantino stated: “The most effective
means of subjugating a people is to capture their minds. Military
victory does not necessarily signify conquest. As long as feelings of
resistance remain in the hearts of the vanquished, no conqueror is
secure….Education therefore, serves as a weapon in wars of colonial
conquest (2).” And closed his short but powerful essay with: We must
now think of ourselves, of our salvation, of our future. And unless we
prepare the minds of the young for this endeavor, we shall always be a
pathetic people with no definite goals and no assurance of
preservation (19).”
Carter G. Woodson and Renato Constantino insightfully recognized that
while the physical chains have been removed, it is the chain on the
brain – slave mentality or colonial mentality – that remained a
primary obstacle in the way to genuine freedom. Additionally, both
Woodson and Constantino would conclude that the unfinished task is to
decolonize our minds, remove the chain from our brains and make our
way to genuine freedom and self-determination. Self-determination is a
degree of power exhibited when a people reclaim their culture and
history and work towards the maintenance of their identity and dignity
in a society that has marginalized their culture and history for the
purpose of exploitation.