A matter of life and breath

NEW YORK CITY — It was a great day for a march. Cold but not unbearably so, the sky bright, and so was the collective mood. The crowds assembled at Greenwich Village’s Washington Square arch on a Saturday afternoon, walked north to 34^th Street, then proceeded south on Broadway and ended at police headquarters, at the foot of Brooklyn Bridge. The assembled marchers were of every race and ethnicity, age, class and sexual identity. Young parents with their kids, some in strollers; grandparents who looked to be veterans of other marches; teens in a variety of outfits, from punk to hip hop to staid (and plaid); young professionals; middle-aged scholars and activists.

It was a march for justice, for equality; it was more specifically a protest against police brutality and the deaths of unarmed male African Americans either in shootings—there was that 12-year-old kid in Cleveland gunned down for playing with a toy pistol—or, in the case of Staten island Eric Garner, death due to a chokehold used on him by a police officer. His offense? Allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, similar in a way to the street vendors of yosi and Juicy Fruit gum one sees on the streets of Metro Manila, hardly a menace to society and certainly not something to kill him for.

The sense of outrage was palpable, fed by the video gone viral, of Garner dying on a Staten island sidewalk as a group of cops stood around him, wondering if he was still alive, ignoring his earlier protestations of “I can’t breathe.” (That protestation, along with “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” that a teenaged Michael Brown was said to have uttered before being shot, in Ferguson, Missouri, has become the cri de coeur of the various nationwide demonstrations, and echoed in sport arenas by professional, mainly African American, athletes.) The emergency medical team that arrived seemed intimidated by the police presence. It was outrage compounded by the fact that a grand jury, as also in the instance of the shooting of Brown, would not indict the cop who used the chokehold (very clearly caught on video, an illegal maneuver according to the New York Police Department’s own rulebook). Garner’s death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner’s office.

Filipinos who think that they don’t have to worry about that kind of a fate are deluding themselves. While the post-Civil Rights years have undeniably seen quite a bit of progress in terms of the legal rights of people of color, there is still considerable lag between the official perspective of a racially blind society and the continuing and poisonous mindset that views African-American males with suspicion and other minorities of color through the prism of stereotypes. The relentless opposition to the first African American president—the first president of color—particularly on the part of so many Republicans whose vocabulary when it comes to any proposal from President Obama seems limited to “No!,” what is that but an unyielding belief that such a man cannot possibly be worthy of the office?

Can the virus of racism ever be eliminated? Unlikely; not ever is how I feel about it. It’s there in the relationship between a dominant white America and, say, Filipino-Americans, one fraught with the complexities brought about by colonialism. During the Philippine-American War US.soldiers routinely referred to the Filipino revolutionary fighters as gooks, savages and monkeys without tails. I recall Percy, a Filipino I had befriended years ago in Manhattan telling me that when he lived in San Francisco a white woman he had met asked him if in fact Pinoys did have tails. Ever cheeky, Percy replied that he did have one and it was between his legs and did the lady wish to see it?

Early on, Filipinos were viewed as no different from African Americans. On February 4, 1899, when shots exchanged between Aguinaldo’s soldiers and U.S. forces ignited the 1899 Philippine-American War, one bluecoat by the name of Willy Grayson of the Nebraska Volunteers, shouted eagerly to his comrades-in-arms, “Line up, fellas. The niggers are in here all through these yards.” One unfortunate legacy of course was the adoption of these self-same mindless biases by a brown-skinned population. Not that the U.S. was the only source; Spain had insistently hammered into the indios’ heads that they could never be the equal of the fairer Iberian colonizers.

These wrongheaded assumptions about the virtues or vices attributable to skin color still prevail, witness the prevalence of whitening creams on the market. There is the gibe about vice-president Jejomar Binay: that if his expected bid for the presidency succeeds, he will be the first “black” president of the country. While I am no fan of the veep, this intended put-down doesn’t advance political discourse one bit.

African Americans were part of the US forces fighting first the Spanish and then the Filipinos in 1898 and 1899. They were known colloquially as Buffalo Soldiers, given that name by Native Americans. After hostilities in the Philippines ceased (never completely, with resistance continuing in certain areas), a number of these African Americans stayed on and married local women. A descendant of one of those unions is U.S. born Evangeline Canonizado Buell, a resident of the Bay Area, who in 2007 came out with Twenty-Five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride, a book detailing her life and its complicated tangle of roots. It’s a rich and insightful examination of a mixed lineage, the wrong one in the eyes of the white majority. To be both Filipino and African American was tantamount to being doubly cursed. Buell’s book, while clear-eyed, reveals no bitterness.

Closer to home I have a niece who is married to an African American, a civilian in the employ of the US Air Force. They have a four-year-old son, Dean, a smart, lovable bundle of energy. When I read the accounts of young black males dead after encounters with the police, I couldn’t help but think of Dean. I fervently hope that the national conversations we are having right now about race will mean that by the time he gets to be a teenager, he’ll have much less to fear in case he ever is in a situation where cops are involved.

Copyright L.H. Francia 2014