Brown Skin, White Minds: Exploring Oppression’s Most Insidious Consequence – Transcript

00:08Hello, my name is Ej David and I'm honored to have been invited by APA to share with you all a little bit about my work. Today, I will be talking about colonial mentality or more generally internalized oppression among Filipino Americans.

00:24This has been the focus of my work for almost two decades now. And today I want to focus on three aspects of this line of my work, the manifestation, the operation and the mental health implications of colonial mentality. But before I do that, I must first do some acknowledgments, which is something I do with every talk.

00:46I am an immigrant from the Philippines. These are my paternal grandparents when they were married in the 1930s. And although I identify as Filipino, as it is what is most familiar to people, Filipino really is a colonial name. The peoples in the lands now known as the Philippines are very diverse.

01:05There are many ethnic and cultural groups throughout the islands. My ancestors are Kapampangan and Tagalog. They are people of the river banks and people of the river. And it is them who I must acknowledge and it is them who are with me today.

01:21I also must acknowledge my family. My wife is Koyukon Athabaskan from the village of Ruby by the Yukon River in the interior of Alaska. Athabaskans are one of the many different indigenous peoples in what is now known as Alaska. Together we have four children, Malakas, Kalayaan, Kaluguran and Tala.

01:41And even though you don't see them here physically with me right now, they are always with me, just like my ancestors. I am a reflection of my family, just like I am a reflection of my ancestors. And then finally, I want to acknowledge that I am joining you all from the traditional lands of the Dinayina people, the Gayakak, otherwise known as Anchorage.

02:02It is here where I live and work at the University of Alaska Anchorage. So let's begin. As I alluded to earlier, I will be sharing with you my work on colonial mentality, which is a specific form of internalized oppression, particularly of internalized racism.

02:18And internalized racial oppression may be defined as the individual inculcation of the racist stereotypes, values, images and ideologies perpetuated by the white dominant society about one's racial group, leading to feelings of self-doubt, disgust and disrespect for one's race and or oneself.

02:39In the field of psychology, literature on the internalized level of racism is lagging behind the literature on interpersonal racism, which is the racism that takes place between individuals and the kind of racism that we often think of when we think of racism.

02:55Internalized racial oppression literature is even lagging behind the literature on institutionalized racism, which is the policies and assumptions and cultural norms that are often assumed to be fair, but nevertheless benefit some racial groups and keeps others down.

03:12Indeed, a basic search on psych info using the term racism revealed almost 13,000 hits. And for institutionalized racism, it revealed almost 1,000 hits. This suggests that around 12,000 focused on interpersonal racism and only around 1,000 focused on institutional racism.

03:34As low as that is, though, for institutional racism, the term internalized racism produced even fewer hits, only 300. This is surprising because psychology, you know, with its emphasis on individual level and internal factors, like cognitions, emotions, attitudes, it seems to be the field that is arguably the most intuitively equipped to study the internalized component of racism.

04:00Thus, my work on this area attempts to fill this large gap in the literature. Also, as I alluded to earlier, I will be centering the experiences of Filipino Americans in my presentation today. Analogous to how internalized racial oppression has been relatively forgotten in psychological research, Filipino Americans have been relatively understudied and underserved and invisibilized, both in the field of psychology and also in the general society.

04:29Even though Filipino Americans are now the third, but as recently as last year, Filipino Americans were the second largest Asian American ethnic group in the United States, composing about 20% of the Asian American population. But despite that, attention and recognition of Filipino Americans is relatively lower compared to other groups.

04:51In our field of psychology, for example, a search on psych info using the six largest Asian groups as key word revealed that literature on Filipinos lagged behind other Asian groups, including Asian groups that are smaller. Chinese has around 30,000 hits, Japanese has more than 13,000, Korean has more than 7,000.

05:13Filipino only has around 1,000 hits, even though Filipinos have been the second largest Asian group. The general society's attention and acknowledgement of Filipinos also lag behind other Asian groups. For instance, I did a quick content analysis a couple of years ago of four major media outlets that focus on Asian Americans, a website, a magazine, a major newspaper and a major

05:39network. And what I found was that coverage of Filipino stories lags significantly behind other Asian ethnic groups. For example, in this graph, you will see how much each of the four media outlets covered the sixth largest Asian subgroups. The red line for each subgroup represents their percentage of the Asian population. And as you can see, Chinese composed around 23% of the

06:04population, that's the red line for them, but the four media outlets covered them at a disproportionately higher rate way above the red line. You see similar results for Koreans and Japanese. For Filipinos, South Asians and Vietnamese, as you can see, coverage from each of the four media outlets are below the red line. For Filipinos specifically, even though they are the second largest Asian group

06:30during this time, stories about them from the four major media outlets are very rare. This is the reason why Filipinos have been regarded as the forgotten Asian Americans and the invisible minorities. And it's important to pay attention to Filipino experiences specifically and not just assume that their experiences are similar or the same as other Asians, because Filipinos have very

06:55different historical, cultural, and psychological realities than other Asian groups. And what is perhaps the most important factor that separates Filipinos from other Asian groups is Filipino's extensive history of colonialism and its legacies. First colonized by Spain for approximately 350 years, and then the U.S. for approximately 50 years, but arguably even longer. These colonial

07:21experiences and their legacies are further reinforced by neo-colonialism. And culturally and psychologically, the implications of this colonial past and present is vast. The damages that colonialism wroughts on Filipinos was eloquently described by Filipino national hero Jose Risal in the late 1800s. He said, little by little, they lost their old traditions, the

07:50mementos of their past. They give up their writing, their songs, their poems, their loss in order to learn by rote, other doctrines which they did not understand. Another morality, another aesthetics different from those inspired by their climate and their manner of thinking, degrading themselves in their own eyes, they became ashamed of what was their own. They began to admire and praise whatever was foreign and incomprehensible. Their spirit was dismayed and it surrendered to

08:15this disgust of themselves. Jose Risal was describing Filipinos' experience of internalized racial oppression way back in 1889. And then approximately 50 years later, post-colonial scholar and psychiatrist Franz Fanon provided us with what is probably the most influential analysis of the psychological impacts of colonialism. My work has been heavily inspired by Franz Fanon

08:41and if there's one passage from his writings that pretty much captures my work, it is this one. For many years to come, we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonialist onslaughts. Imperialism sows seeds of decay here and there that must be mercilessly rooted out from our land and from our minds.

09:06Other translations of the part that is italicized and underlined is imperialism leaves behind germs of rot, which we must clinically detects and remove from our land but from our minds as well. Growing up in the Philippines in the 80s and 90s, approximately 40 years after the country became independent from the United States, 40 years after it stopped being a colony, I nevertheless was

09:30still bombarded by colonialism's legacies. US military bases were still there, the United States had set up the economy and the education system and the government in such a way that our labor resources and policies still benefited the United States. I grew up in a country where English is considered to be an official language and the language used in school instruction.

09:52Being able to speak English well was considered a sign of intelligence of high class. Skin whitening products were being sold everywhere and in multiple forms, tablets, lotions, soap, bleach, and even IV drips. People who were dark-skinned, non-urban, non-westernized and non-English speaking were regarded as inferior and this is in a land that was supposedly free, independent and no longer

10:19a colony. And this is why Fanon's statement that colonialism leaves behind germs of rot in our land and in our minds rings very true to me. I've seen it and felt it firsthand. But when I started doing psychological research a little over 20 years ago, I found that the field of psychology didn't really pay attention to colonial mentality. I found it strange that a field focused on

10:45studying people's mentalities or minds paid almost no attention to the study of the colonized mind or colonial mentality and this doesn't mean that there's no literature on this. Other fields in the humanities mostly and maybe a little bit in other social sciences have done work on colonial mentality and internalized oppression but psychology was way behind them. So I thought maybe this was because psychology wants to be a hard science so badly and it wants to quantify things and

11:13statistically connect variables and do experiments. And so therefore I thought I will use methods that psychology uses and values and regards as valid to study colonial mentality or internalized oppression so that maybe psychology and society will finally listen and regard colonial mentality and internalized oppression as a serious issue. And so I conducted a series of studies to