This essay was originally published on Inheritance Magazine on August 26, 2021
“Blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin.” My father gave me an image of who I would marry. See, he almost married a white girl himself. He lived for about five years in the United States before moving back home to the Philippines to become a church planter. He had every opportunity to marry a white girl in the States, but it never happened. Dad told me, “God called me home, and I listened.”
Upon returning to the Philippines, he met my mother. She had darker hair and deep brown eyes, but my dad reflected that “at least she had lighter skin.” She wasn’t as white as his ideal spouse, but “white enough” to satisfy desire. He even used the word mestisa to describe her, a racial term used by Spanish colonizers to classify Filipinas who weren’t fully white but close enough through their mixed ancestry. Still today, mestisa describes the standard of what it means for women to be beautiful in the Philippines, a symbol of colonial mentality.
Driving through the streets of Manila, you’ll see billboards that advertise skin whitening products. Whether they’re drugs that contain the chemical glutathione or papaya whitening lotions, these products continue to shape Filipino imaginations into the lie that Black or Brown skin is malevolent, and white skin is desirable. This is one of the reasons that many Filipinos maintain racist imaginations about Black bodies.
Spanish and American colonizers brought whiteness upon our lands. Today, whiteness lingers as a ghost, and many Filipinos struggle to see beyond it, cursed with an inferiority complex that strives for the white ideal — an ideal that can never truly be achieved.