I want now to discuss topics that many of our people hate to bring out in the open. Los Angeles-based poet-pundit Fred Burce Bunao, who is my literary guru, coined the title of todays column. Obviously Mr. Bunao, who is now an American citizen and a septuagenarian at that, lifted the phrase from another Filipino-American writer, Carlos Bulosan, who wrote Americas in the Heart.
Let us discuss the things that ail this nation, which is probably the greatest country the world has ever known to date. We will let the readers offer ideas and solutions, if any, to some of the practices that are hurting the United States of America and her people. Today let us address racial prejudice, as some of the Ugly Americans of Filipino ancestry still practice.
While as a rule Filipinos are not racists, there are of course some of them who harbor politically-incorrect attitude towards other people of color (Black, Yellow in the case of Chinese and Japanese and some other ethnic groups). There are still Filipino-American parents who advise their children not to get married to people of color, especially Black Americans (as if they themselves were not colored).
On the other hand there are Filipinos like and Bunao and me who cherish the Black American-Filipino friendship. A growing number of Filipino Americans shares this feeling of good will. In case you have not heard of it, the United States sent during the Christian Filipino-American War (from 1899-1901) more than 6,000 Buffalo (Black American) soldiers. Sixteen of the Buffalo soldiers defected to the Filipino Army, as they said that they did not go to the Islands to enslave another people. All the 16 Black-American defectors died fighting for Filipino freedom. When the first civil governor general, William Howard Taft (who became America's 27th President in 1909) declared peace on July 4, 1901, his administration started shipping back to the United States the unneeded American soldiers. Some 1,200 of the Buffalo soldiers decided to stay behind and married Filipino women.
There is another matter that Minority Americans should be thankful of the Black Americans. Our Afro-American brethren fought so hard for civil liberties and human rights in the late 1950s and 1960s. Many died fighting for racial equality, so that people of all color should be judged not by the pigment of their skin, rather by the content of their character. Unfortunately today a growing number of Minority Americans forgets the sacrifices and heroism of our Black-American brethren. The next time you thank someone for our freedom of speech, for the presence of civil rights in the United States, thank the Afro-American community. They fought the dirty battles for all the ethnic groups in America.
During the Los Angeles riots in the summer of 1990, some Korean Americans were saved from the mobs when they claimed they were "Filipinos." Black Americans know that the closest Asians to them are the Filipinos and the Filipino Americans.
And finally when my club led the protest in 1994 against the designation of a killer of a Manhattan Beach police officer as "Asian, possibly Filipino," only the Black Journalists Association of Los Angeles stood by our side. Our Black-American brethren promised to walk with us when we threatened to picket a mainstream television station in Burbank, CA, if the offensive phrase was not deleted from the nationwide broadcast of the program "Prime Suspect." The TV network caved in and deleted the offensive phrase. The two Filipino-American press clubs and the Asian-American Journalists Association (AAJA) refused to join the Media Breakfast Club-led fight and planned picket. The Chicano News Media Association was not able to give us its answer on time, as we called off before our Chicano-American comrades could make the commitment the demonstration as we had by then achieved the aim. This is the reason I have so far refused to rejoin any Filipino-American press club and the AAJA. They don't have the guts at all to confront Mainstream America of racial insults. By the way, the killer was finally caught and he was half-Caucasian, half-Vietnamese.
So dear friends, if you have any anything at all against the Black-American community, remember these stories and act accordingly.
Now tell me the other things or practices that make Americas in the hurt. So that we can discuss them in this column.
TALK about this topic
