Mestiza mo nung bata ka. Translation (connotation): You were beautiful when you were a child. Translation (literal): You looked Eurasian when you were a child. 

My fair skin and light hair, from when I was a baby up until I was a toddler, were a point of pride for everyone but especially my Mum. She would always say that strangers would stop and tell her ‘Ay ang ganda ng anak mo’ (‘Your child is beautiful’). 

I took up swimming when I was around 5 years old. My Lolo (paternal grandfather) enrolled me in a swimming class in Naga City, a province about 250 kilometres southeast of Manila, where I spent the summer holidays. I went about 2 or 3 times a week and the swimming pool was outdoors, exposed to the heat and light of the equatorial Sun and since it was 2005 and we were in - back then at least - a provincial locale where finding Sunscreen, the price of which was exorbitant, was improbable, I got dark. Very dark. So dark that when I went back home to Manila, to Quezon City where Mum’s side of the family lived, my aunt told me ‘Kailangan mong maligo sa gatas’. Translation (connotation): You’re so ugly because your skin is so dark. Translation (literal): You need to bathe in milk. 

The adults present when this was said laughed.

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It was magical. A metamorphosis. The milky white skin transitioning into the warm dark brown. I wished I remembered, wished I had paid close attention, charted the evolution of my skin as it absorbed the Sun’s rays, taking in its colours and reflecting it back. 

I always have a cup of coffee in the morning. Just regular black, drip filter coffee to which I always add milk. Usually full cream but always lactose free. And whenever I add the white milk into the black coffee I see the little brown girl reflected, swimming, swirling.

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Mum never fails to tell me when someone mistakes her for white. Or part white. It’s a point of pride. You can hear it in her voice, the flattered and excited tone as she recounts how 

‘…the cashier at Woolies thought I was Spanish!’

‘…my new co-workers thought I was mixed race! Half white!’

‘…even my Filipina assistant, Mary, you remember her, we had her over, was shocked when I spoke Tagalog to her! Kala nya puti ako! (She thought I was white!)’

But of course it’s not enough to look white, she has to be white too. Or part white. It’s a matter of fact. You can hear it in her voice, the superiority and confidence of cadence as she recalls how

‘... my Lolo, he was very mestizo. Light brown hair, pale skin and grey eyes. His mother was French-Portuguese you know!’

You see! White blood is in our genetic history!

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Why is it never enough to be Filipina? Why does our brown skin chafe on our brown souls? Why this itching to be other?

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We are so ashamed of being Filipino that we never acknowledge each other. Heads bowed by the weight of our shame we never lift up our eyes to look into each other’s faces. And if we do muster up that courage, to look, and to look openly and to look earnestly and to look desperately, we ignore each other. Ignore the beseeching and hungry eyes that yearns for recognition and connection as it takes in those similar and familiar features. Souls screaming silently Look up! Look at me! Bless me with your smile so I know that you love yourself and therefore can love me. Because I need it.

Instead you walk by me. Or if you deign to look my way, the glance is perfunctory and derogatory. Are you angry at me? Do you despise the desperation you see? Are you angry at yourself? For looking like who you are, so obviously and so blatantly that others of your kind see it too? Do you rage within as I do? That complicated and contradictory rage? Rage born from self hatred because you wear your race on your face. Rage born from self hatred because you hate that you hate yourself?

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And race is here to stay. We have all bought into it. Who wins the race? We need to populate the Earth with these winners. Survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism. Desirable hereditary characteristics. More suitable races (Francis Galton). You can’t take this suit off. Once it’s on, it’s on forever. So throw the baby out with the bath water. 

There is no alternative. No race neutrality without race homogeneity. Race is a rash with no remedy.

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I can’t blame you for hating the way you look, Ate. How can I hate you hating your own skin when every commercial you see advertises creams and soaps and body washes and lotions and potions that will guarantee a lighter, brighter complexion in just 10 days! How can I hate you when all the billboards you look at when you’re stuck in traffic are about this dermatologist or that one - Vicki Belo? - promising treatments that will guarantee you that white skin you’ve always wanted (and you have wanted it, haven’t you) or get your money back! Certainly all the artistas na magaganda (beautiful celebrities) in all of the telenovellas have that glowing pale skin. How can I hate you when, ever since you were a child, Nanay told you to stay out of the Sun? Kasi kung hindi, iitim ka! (Because if not, your skin will turn black!) How can I hate you when your society venerates the mestizos and mestizos, the Filipinos of mixed race? But only if the race being mixed with is of a lighter shade! I can’t even hate you when you say ‘Sana makuha yung kulay nang Tatay nya!’ (Hopefully they will get their father’s skin colour!) to your sisters who are darker, if not as dark, as you? I can’t blame you! I can’t hate you! Everyone wants to be recognised as beautiful and Beauty’s prerequisite is a white, white skin! 

So keep buying those Belo Essentials effective skin-whitening products! And remember to get those hard and rough loofahs, the ones that feel like the steel scrubbing pads for the kalderos (pots and pans), and rub those viscous liquids into your skin until it stings. Scrub like you’re trying to remove a stain. Scrub like the colour of your skin is an irresistible rash, an itch that compels, that demands you to scratch.

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A distinction needs to be made when it comes to the concept of ‘race love’ and ‘race pride’, important to know that these concepts are vastly different - and have vastly different outcomes and effects within the white hegemony of the social order - depending on the people who practise it. 

For those systemically oppressed peoples, ‘race love’ is an act of rebellion, a radical act. It is battling against the constant barrage of propaganda. A digging through the dirt that society has buried you in and a finding of your beauty that society insists is not there. To the oppressed peoples, ‘race pride’ is not arrogance but appreciation. It is the piecing together of the meagre scraps of history, frayed and stained, and creating a tapestry. An armour against corrosive stereotypes, it is meant as protection, meant for the defence of its peoples who have long suffered and continue to suffer abuse and injustice. 

‘Race love’ and ‘race pride’, for them, for us, is not the donning of battle gear for attack. This armour is not for tyranny or colonisation or genocide. For us it is not the preservation of a perverse ‘racial’ hierarchy, but its subversion.

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Went to the salon to get my haircut by Tony. I had actually only booked a haircut, no washing because it costs extra and I’m only employed part time but Tony took one look at it and said he can’t cut my hair when it’s too oily. Anyway, as he was washing my oily hair, he asked me, 

‘So where are you from?’. 

I feel like he’s asked me this before, in my first hair appointment with him when he left my hair too long but I didn’t have the balls to tell him to cut it shorter. I’ve been asked this question before by other people, multiple other people. Asking me or trying not to but wanting to know. It’s the eyes, the eyes give the unspoken question away. Giving you a once over. Maybe lingering on your face, even for just a fraction of a nanosecond. Trying to decipher the different physical elements - skin colour, hair colour and texture, eye colour and shape, nose shape, lip shape, chin, cheeks, height - into a cohesive Race so they can put you in a box, associate you with a stereotype. 

‘Oh yeah, my wife's Filipino!’ 

‘Oh I spent a holiday there once! Kawmooosta kahh? (Kamusta ka? How are you?)’

‘Do you live in the West then?’

And you feel it when they’re trying not to ask you that question. You get tingly. You get prickly. You feel exasperated and amused because it’s kind of funny that they’re uncomfortable in not knowing and their wanting to know is so ridiculous because why the fuck does it matter where you’re from and what your race is. Is it not enough to know that you are human, that you are a person? But of course not! So you get used to it when people ask where you’re from (connotation: what is your race?) even though it still kind of pisses you off, even though the stereotypes chafe, even though the smirk the white guy with the Filipina wife gives you makes your skin crawl and the mangled Tagalog they speak makes you break out in hives. 

Anyway Tony didn’t really give me the time to respond to his question. The next thing he asked me was 

‘Are you Italian?’

It was a whiplash of emotions because I felt flabbergasted at how someone could be so wrong but I also felt validated because here was a white person who mistook me for another white person and I had never been mistaken for white before. Not since childhood when I was too young and carefree to remember. I felt validated and seen because they’ve always told me white was better, white was beautiful, white was human, white was person. And then I felt ashamed of myself for feeling elated that someone thought I was white. Where is my race pride? And I was angry at myself because this meant I’ve swallowed the lies and prejudices they’ve fed me since birth, a steady diet throughout my life. So fucking angry because that meant I was subconsciously admitting that I was inferior because I was Filipino and being Filipino is inferior because look how happy I was when he thought I was Italian. 

‘No, I’m Filipino.’

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I went back and forth on whether or not I would tell Mum but we were sitting on the couch and somehow the topic of race came up again. She was telling me about how the current Miss Universe, though representing the United States, was half Filipina. This inevitably led to her recounting for the umpteenth time that when she was younger, everyone in the family thought she should be entered into beauty pageants (Filipinos are enamoured with beauty pageants). That she would be the next Miss Universe. 

At that point I was itching to tell her about what Tony said. And so I blurted it out. ‘Tony thought I was Italian.’ I tried to play it cool, play up the incredulity of the misidentification because that’s how you tell your Filipino mother that people thought you are worthy of notice too. That you’re beautiful too.