Stained Glass Garden

By Anonymous / Fall 2022

Writing in the fall has always been one of my favorite pastimes. I sit here now in my mom’s garden writing to you, while her chrysanthemums are in full bloom, and dragonflies are making their rounds. When I’m in her garden I always enjoy seeing the bugs that visit, it’s almost as if they’re blessing the plants. My mother’s love for plants stems from her province in the Philippines, where she lived among grass fields, clear blue beaches, and carabaos. Both my parents immigrated from the PI, my dad in 1985 when he was 16, and my mother in 1992 when she was 27. My parents had me in 1996 when they also bought their first home after living with my mom’s sisters for a few years. Two years later my brother was born, and we moved out of my aunties house and into our brand-new home in San Diego.

Growing up, I had relatives surrounding me constantly. My mom has two brothers and seven sisters, her being the youngest, and they each immigrated to the states gradually throughout the years. My father’s family didn’t immigrate here until 2004, and my dad took two families in and let them live with us for a while. Living with them helped me excel with my Tagalog, except now that I became so fluent in understanding, things my relatives would say under their breath became a lot clearer to understand than before. Another favorite pastime of mine is swimming, so much so that I taught myself how to swim when I was eight. I would spend hours in the pool, to the point where my fingers looked like raisins and my skin glistened like the soil my mom would water and grow her plants in. At the time, I didn’t understand the science behind why my skin would darken after long hours of swimming, but at the same time, I didn’t care. Even if I were to stay that way my entire life, I still looked the same, to me anyway.

In the summer of 2004, my father took me and my brother to the pool to swim before our family reunion later. Family from all over were coming to visit my relatives staying with us, so I was completely over the moon about meeting everyone. It’ll be my first time meeting a lot of them, so I put on my favorite outfit and gathered all my favorite toys and games that I could share. One by one everyone started to flood in, and I was beaming with excitement. However, that excitement started to fade throughout the day because, for some odd reason, the first thing people would make comments about was how much darker I was in comparison to everyone else in my family. I was about eleven at the time. The more comments I got about the color of my skin, the more I felt myself being insecure about it. They look at me as if my skin has been stained. “What’s the matter with my skin being dark?” I thought to myself. “Why don’t they like my dark skin?” They must have not known that I understood Tagalog, having been raised here in San Diego, so they would make the most derogatory remarks about my skin, all while being in the same room. What was more confusing to me was that my parents didn’t defend me. So, I thought, maybe they thought the same thing that they did.

Looking deeply, I think about how my parents have learned their history, and the education they received in the PI. Are they aware of their colorist/racist attitudes? Did my relatives influence their perception? Taking a closer look into history, U.S. imperialism and Spanish colonialism bring forth Eurocentric and White Supremacist ideologies. Europeanness and Whiteness were considered pure and desirable, while Blackness and Indigeneity were perceived as savages and filth. In Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror, he discusses how in the English mind, the color black was associated with an abundance of negative images. These negative images were seen as, “deeply stained with dirt,” “foul,” “dark or deadly” in purpose, “malignant,” “sinister,” and “wicked.” In contrast, white was associated with more positive imagery, purity, innocence, and goodness. (Takaki, Chapter 3 “The Hidden Origins of Slavery”). When I would look in the mirror and see how much darker my skin was than the rest of my family members, I remember feeling a sense of fear and estrangement. As if I didn't belong to my own family. The more I went swimming in the sunlight, the more concerned I was with my skin turning darker afterward. The idea consumed me so much that I limited my swimming time, and I would only want to swim on days when the sun wasn’t out. I lost a bit of myself in the fear of having dark skin. 

I think back to an NPR article and podcast, American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many, where American Indian children had their culture stripped from them by forcing them to assimilate into Western ideologies. The government’s objective was to “erase and replace”. A Pattwin Indian, named bill Wright, was sent to a boarding school in Nevada when was only 6 years old. He recalls matrons shaving his head and washing him in kerosene. These students were banned from expressing their culture to the point where Wright expresses, he feels he lost not only his language but his American Indian name as well. When reading the article, I was reminded of a cartoon titled, “The Filipino’s First Bath” that was shown on the cover of Judge Magazine and was published on June 20, 1899. President McKinley is seen washing a Filipino baby. The baby was depicted as a “savage baby”, and McKinley washing the baby is symbolic of washing away marks of savagery to assimilate into Western Order and Identity.

Like most of my mom’s plants, in order to grow and flourish, you have to make sure that water reaches the root. And to water the root, you first must find it. A plant without proper nourishment can’t thrive in its given environment. So, I took it a step further and looked deeper into Filipino colorism and racial attitudes, and the influence their history might have on their perspective. In an article titled “Rendering whiteness visible in the Filipino culture through skin-whitening cosmetic advertisements”, Beverly Natividad discusses Western Colonization, and how it has hindered Filipinos from growing a genuine cultural identity and attained a mentality that glorifies whiteness (Natividad, 2006). Although Western Colonizers left, the Philippines' mass media then took on the role of idealizing whiteness. The focus of their study is to face the current Filipino cultural identity crisis, by looking at whiteness within the mass media context. As a result, they found that the advertisements reinforced colonial ideologies by identifying white skin tone with beauty, wealth, power, and purity. They also found that advertisements glorification of whiteness erased Filipino women’s self-concept, thus participating in the colonial ideologies by purchasing these skin-whitening cosmetics. 

When I was about twelve years old, I remember my mom gifting me new body soap to use in the shower. It’s the same one she uses, papaya soap. She goes on to tell me the benefits of using it, and that not only does it smell good, but it’s “whitening soap”. It can make my skin appear brighter and whiter, like the celebrities on TV. She would always idolize Filipino celebrities and put a lot of emphasis on how fair their skin was. Making it seem as though the more fair your skin was, the more beautiful you were. All, and I mean all, of the celebrities, they considered to be, “the face of beauty” at the time, had fair skin. I rarely saw any celebrities or models that look like me. That had dark skin, like me. I can vividly remember seeing commercials about whitening soap, and how suddenly, I wanted to look just like them. Of course, being so young, I was influenced easily. Although I remember feeling conflicted about using it, mostly because I have eczema, I was so consumed with the idea that it would brighten my skin, that I didn’t care. All I knew was, I wouldn’t have to worry about being “dark” anymore. I wouldn’t have to worry about my skin being associated with such negative imagery if I just keep cleansing my skin with this soap as if I was "removing the stain". Little did I know the harm I was inflicting on myself in doing so. 

Fast forward to Spring of 2020, I’m in college now and I have my coffee in hand as I sit in front of my laptop screen watching my psychology Professor lecture about eye-witness testimonies and forensic scientists. Not too long after the lecture, I decided to take a break from my computer screen and replace it with my phone screen, to catch up with what was going on in the media. I open my Twitter app and instantly as I scan my timeline, I see the news ads tweeting: lockdowns, thousands laid-off, not enough hospital beds for patients, rise in death for COVID-19 cases. There’s not much I can do about the pandemic besides stay confined in the comfort of my own house, and that’s all I’ve been doing for how many months now. I click on the trending page to see what’s headlining, as my eyes wander, I see the hashtag, #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd trending #1, and directly beneath it, “I can’t breathe”. I start to feel a pit in my stomach, not too long ago I saw the same headline trending, only now with a different name. Not even two months ago, in March, a woman named Breonna Taylor was fatally shot by the police in her apartment. Now, this? The moment I saw the headline I had already anticipated what it was I was about to see. Before I clicked on the headline I took a deep breath and pressed on the tab. After watching the video of George Floyd’s murder, the pit in my stomach sank even further. As time went on, outrage grew more each day justice was not granted, and that outrage sparked protests all over the US. The moment I heard protests were going on in my city, I knew I had to participate. I wanted to join the fight for justice and help end police brutality in any way that I could. I only wish it was that easy to drop everything and leave like that. My parents disapproved of my decision to participate, but they didn’t know what I was fighting for. Not only that, but we’re also still in the middle of a pandemic. In the days leading up to the protests, I made it my mission to convince my parents that I was fighting for what I thought to be good and right. As I try to gather my thoughts about what I should say, my mind rewinds to the days after the pool, where I would receive constant criticism for my dark skin. It’s been almost a decade since I let those kinds of comments bother me. I wonder if maybe they’ve changed like my perspective has changed in my years attending community college. 

It's always a challenge to make people see things from your perspective, especially if the person is deeply rooted in Naïve realism. In social psychology, Naïve realism, “is the tendency to believe our perception of the world reflects it exactly as it is, unbiased and unfiltered.” As much as I would like to think that everyone has an open mind about particular ideologies, the odds just aren’t in our favor. A lot of the debates that I would participate in concerning the BLM movement, all seem to have one thing in common. They refuse to acknowledge systemic racism, and how important it is to consider the history behind why all of this is still happening. In a video by NPR podcasts titled, Housing Segregation and Redlining in America, they touch on how housing segregation works in America and how it deeply affects black and brown communities directly. They address how in the 1930’s, the Homeowners Loan Corporation created residential security maps, which were maps that were categorized into four sections: green meant “best area, best people” (businessmen), blue meant “good people” (white-collar families), yellow meant “declining area” with working-class families, and red “detrimental influences” “hazardous”, foreign-born people, low-class white, and most importantly, black people. Although in 1968 Congress passed the Fair Housing Act which made it illegal to discriminate in housing, over the years it has been rarely enforced. You can still see the effects of housing segregation today, in cities like Baltimore MLK Boulevard, or any MLK boulevard in any US city, my hometown included. It has significant effects on wealth, health, education, and policing. For example, black and brown communities are more heavily policed than those who, according to the map, live in green/blue areas. A lot of the time, regarding police brutality, a lot of people argue, “it’s just one bad apple.” However, case after case where people are losing their lives simply because police feel they are in danger in the mere presence of black and brown people, like Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, the list seems never-ending, you realize it isn’t just a couple of bad apples. It’s an entire system designed to uphold white supremacist ideologies.

Throughout the years, I started to gain a new perspective on myself. As I became more educated about Filipino and American history, I learned to be comfortable in my skin. I made more friends from all different backgrounds, which made me more self-aware and cognizant of how others walk through life differently than I do. Now I can proudly say that I love my dark skin. My skin is beautiful in the same way stainedglass is beautiful: a wide array of colors. Another thing I do now is swim at all hours of the day for however long I want to, without worrying about how tan my skin will be when I get out. The knowledge I’ve acquired throughout the years I like to think of as the water that nourishes me. After I turned 18, I shared a lot of that water with my parents, family, and friends. As I educated myself on Filipino and American history, I would also take that home with me, and share it with my family. What I didn’t notice then was that I inadvertently made them see a different perspective, one they hadn’t considered before. Whenever they would make derogatory or racist remarks about black or brown skin, I would instantly point out the flaws in their statements. How harmful what they’re saying can be, and how detrimental it is to one’s identity. It wasn’t easy, but the more I stood firm in my own beliefs and educated myself along the way, the more I was able to reach out to my family and give them a new perspective that they haven’t considered before. I was able to help water their roots. 

I snap myself back to that moment in time when I’m about to convince them to let me go to the BLM protests. Before I could even ask, I overhear my brother, who is two years younger than me, defending my decision to go. I can hear myself in his arguments, and I was endearingly touched by this sentiment because not only was I able to get to my parents throughout the years, but I also got through to my brother. I ended up participating in the BLM protests happening in my city, knowing fully that I have my family's support in the matter. Knowing that my family is straying further from colorist/racial attitudes that uphold white supremacist ideologies, makes me feel hopeful that others can do it too. Like my mom’s garden, the more you water and nourish your plants, the likelihood that they will bloom is more probable than not. Although not all plants may grow under the same conditions, you’ll still be able to create a garden with the ones that do. 

References

Natividad, Beverly Romero. “Rendering whiteness visible in the Filipino culture through skin whitening cosmetic advertisements.”

NPR. “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.”

NPR. “Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History.”

Judge Magazine. "The Filipinos First Bath.” Wikimedia Commons.

Youtube. “Skin Whitening Commercials.”