Will Pinoys reject Obama because he's black?

Posted on INQUIRER.net
February 25, 2008

My wife Mara and I have been ecstatic about the idea of Barack Obama as the first person of color to become president of the United States. But she sadly pointed out something recently: Chances are that many Filipinos will not vote for a black person. I hope she’s wrong. But there’s a basis for her concern.

Take the results of the California Democratic primary which was won by Hillary Clinton. Obama won decisively among whites and African Americans. But Clinton won overwhelmingly among Latinos voters by a 2-to-1 margin. And, in the biggest surprise of the contest, she also won even more convincingly, 3 to 1, among Asians.

As Bruce Cain, the veteran political analyst from UC Berkeley told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Asians were a surprise. It's the first (presidential) election we have seen where Asian voters were a big factor..... The two major immigrant groups voted for Clinton as opposed to the candidate who has the immigrant background.”

There are many possible reasons for Clinton’s triumph, of course. She’s been around longer. Among Latinos especially, she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, are respected and admired. As others have noted, she has a strong track record as a political leader.

But I just cannot help thinking that race is a factor here. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison said something years ago that I’ve never forgotten: That in their desire to become part of America, many immigrants embrace the views of the dominant white society – including the prejudiced, distorted image of blacks.

“In race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens,” she wrote in Time magazine in 1993. “Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American… It doesn't matter anymore what shade the newcomer's skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open.”

There have long been tensions between blacks and Asians, including Filipinos. So many times have I heard Filipinos privately denigrate blacks, referring to them as “egoy” and “nognog.” And I’ve come across that tension from the other side. As a metro reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, I was assigned to cover the Los Angeles black community’s reaction to the arrest of OJ Simpson in 1994. When I tried to interview a member of a black church in South Central LA, he looked at me derisively and said in a non-threatening but defiant manner, “You [expletive] got a job, huh. Go talk to someone friendlier.”

Where did this resentment come from? The past has some answers. Historically, blacks and Asians have been pitted against each other. After the Civil War, newspapers and public officials portrayed immigrant Chinese workers as more obedient and industrious than the newly freed blacks whom they replaced on plantations in the South.

In the 1960s the stereotype of the industrious Asian morphed into the image of the “model minority.” Asians were portrayed as the ideal minority – hard working, complacent, non-threatening. That, of course, implied that other ethnic communities, particularly blacks and Latinos, were the opposite.

Around the time this stereotype was gaining traction, African Americans were spearheading the Civil Rights activist movement. Their sacrifices paved the way for a new era in which diversity was not only advocated and defended but celebrated.

As blacks were getting clubbed and thrown in jail for fighting for equality, US immigration rules were changing, opening the doors to newcomers from Asia, mostly professionals from the middle class, including many Filipinos. Many of those immigrants benefited from this new consciousness, not to mention the stricter laws that made it illegal to discriminate based on ethnicity, race or gender.

Sadly, these newcomers were unaware of the battles fought in the streets of Alabama, Washington DC and elsewhere. Worse, as Toni Morrison noted, many of them readily embraced American society’s long held prejudices against Blacks.

As the noted Asian American civil rights attorney Bill Lee told me many years ago when I wrote about this issue for the San Francisco Chronicle, "Immigrant communities generally tend not to know the history and to buy into the biases and prejudices of the dominant group. Unfortunately, becoming American often means buying into the prejudices. They want to identify upward. They don't want to identify with those at the bottom.”

To be sure, many Asian American activists, including Filipino Americans, defied the model minority myth. They chose to identify with those at the bottom – to understand the past sacrifices that gave rise to the rights and privileges people of color enjoy today.

One of them, the Japanese American civil rights attorney Kathy Imahara, said, "It started with this bizarre model minority thing, this image of the white man holding an Asian American up and patting us on the head in this condescending manner and telling other minorities, particularly Blacks and Latinos, ‘If you minorities just work as hard as the Asians, then you too will be able to succeed.’”

This brings me back to the excitement over the rise of Barack Obama. He and his supporters stress that he deserves the voters’ support because of his qualifications, not his race. But I agree with those who support him because he is talented, inspiring – and black. Imagine how his victory would shatter the distorted images of African Americans and other communities of color.

Again let me stress as I have in the past, there are no guarantees. Obama is untested, a newcomer on the political stage. Pareng Barack could very well turn out to be as flawed or incompetent as some of the recent occupants of the White House.

But it’s worth taking the chance. If he succeeds, if he turns out to be the wise and courageous leader he promises to be in this ongoing campaign, what a great new chapter that would be in the turbulent, often painful, story of race in America.