Michelle on Her Own Skin Color
Eric Muller posted an excerpt of a 1998 Seattle Times Malkin column. This should put to rest any claims that Michelle is herself not a racist. Before she became the vile one she is today, her racism was a source of defensiveness and a quite obvious inferiority complex.
MY skin is light mocha brown.
Growing up in rural South Jersey, it always seemed darker than it really was. To the pink-necked bigots who couldn’t tell Philadelphia from the Philippines, the light mocha brown skin of the Maglalang family and the caramel skin of the Patel family and the deep ebony skin of the Jackson family were indistinguishable. We were all equal, all right. Equally non-white. Equally “Niggers.”
On a recent vacation, my naturally burnished hide once again invited the kind of circus-freak scrutiny I’d grown indifferent to since childhood. A genteel lady from rural Virginia had been chatting vacuously with my husband (who happens to be a person of pallor). When I joined him casually and slipped my hand in his, the curious belle interrupted herself to squint closely at my brown visage. In the lilting, exaggerated manner of a civilized explorer trying to
communicate with a deaf barbarian, she asked me: “AND . . . WHAR . . . ARE . . . YEW . . . FRUM?”I’ve been called every racial epithet in the book. But whites aren’t the only ones who pass ill judgments based on color.
Within my own ethnic group - within my own family - there is shade-based bigotry. Back in the Philippines, upscale restaurants refuse to hire natives with skin darker than sand. The movie industry promotes model “mestizos” and “Maria Claras” - pale as paper due to the blanching effect of Spanish blood. Lighter-skinned cousins mocked me as “The Brownie.” Pitying aunties suggested rubbing my skin with pumice stones for a more desirable complexion.
So it comes as no small surprise to learn that Asian Americans like myself are now considered non-minorities of non-color in the press. A news article last week on minority admissions at the University of California referred to “students of color” on the one hand - and “Asians and whites” on the other.
In a recent editorial decrying California’s Proposition 209 and Washington state’s Initiative 200, The Seattle Times referred to the “precipitous drop in minority admissions” in California as a result of abolishing racial preferences.
Numerous stories further reported that “minority admissions” had plummeted at UC Berkeley by 61 percent. The Times and other leading opponents of I-200 warn ominously that what’s happening on California campuses could happen here if the measure passes in November.
But what’s really happening?
As UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh points out, the total percentage of racial minority students at Berkeley - including Asians - actually fell from 57 percent to 49 percent, not by 61 percent. And, Volokh observed: “The drop was exclusively among blacks, Latinos and American Indians. Asians, who make up less than 10 percent of the California population, apparently aren’t a minority.’”
Whitewashing Asians out of the post-209 college admissions equation allows for simpler, more inflammatory rhetoric. Thus, The Seattle Times can look at California and conclude that proponents of race-neutral policies in Washington state want to “preserve preferences of greatest advantage to white males and to eliminate those that benefit women and racial and ethnic minorities.” Never mind that abolishing racial preferences in higher ed led to a 16 percent increase in admissions for Asians and Pacific Islanders at Boalt Law School in Berkeley, and a 18 percent increase at UCLA Law School.
Out of political expedience, “minority” has been redefined by racial-preference promoters. It is no longer an objective statistical category, but an ideological status. Members of minority groups who have overcome barriers to success - and who oppose being tallied by race - are no longer viewed as people with valuable heritages, diverse life experiences, or raw memories of discrimination and prejudice. They are effectively “white” and simply don’t count.
A sad irony of the battle over racial preferences here in Washington is that many of the leaders wielding exclusionary paintbrushes are Asian Americans themselves. With a great deal of moral smugness and zeal, they too are echoing calls to defend Washington against the California “threat” of race neutrality. In the name of diversity, they share President Clinton’s concern that race-free, merit-based admissions could lead to universities filling “their entire freshmen classes with nothing but Asian Americans.”
Unbelievable. Never could I have imagined growing up that I would see the day when brown- and yellow-skinned people would stand on the side of pink-skinned bigots railing against the problem of too many of “them.” Never could I have imagined that overcoming the encumbrance of colored skin would be treated with contempt and punished with a new
status in society:Invisible.
Michelle Malkin, “Whitewashing Asians Out of Racial Preference Debate,” Seattle Times, May 26, 1998, at B4.
I could be off, but with a little more decency(probably counselling for obvious emotional issues), reading this I really think she could have been something great. It’s really sad to see someone with so much potential just turn it all into something rotten. *shakes head in shame*
Comment by Star — June 24, 2006 @ 3:03 am
Hey, have you seen those piss poor photoshat Malkin is touting on her page today? Somebody should get one of the many awesome photoshopping forums (fark, worth1000, SA) to do rebuttal posters. That’d be freakin’ sweet. Maybe that’s already happened? If so, can somebody post that link? If not, can somebody make that happen? Please?
Comment by RTD — June 24, 2006 @ 3:18 am
RTD,
My favorite is the “Loose LIBS sink ships” one… Rebuttals would be a great idea.
Feel free to post links here if you find anything. Emailing people is always worthwhile for getting the word out. (TBogg, gordo [of appletree blog], et al.) As you probably know, weekends are slow on the blogs. On top of that I’ll be away from a computer until late tonight.
So treat this (or the next post, if I get something up) as an “open thread”. Thanks.
Comment by Ryan — June 24, 2006 @ 6:57 am
RTD,
Check out this post.
Comment by Ryan — June 24, 2006 @ 8:08 am
As someone who grew up in the US and moved back to the Philippines, I can definitely agree with Malkin regarding the extent of color discrimination in the Philippines. Like many former Spanish colonies, there’s a pro-Mestizo bias in Filipino popular culture. This is due to the fact that Mestizo culture has long been looked on as the Filipino beauty standard as well as being the source of the country’s political and social elite. The influence of the Chinese on the country’s aesthetic ideals also reinforced the pro-light skin bias since Chinese also subscribe to the same light skin ideal. Just like the Spanish, the Chinese light skin bias grows from the fact that dark skinned individuals work outside and get ‘tanned’ while light skinned individuals don’t work outside. There’s that added class-based element.
If my research is correct, White Europeans used to subscribe to this ideal. In fact, the notion of BLUE BLOOD ie., so white that the blue veins and capillaries can be seen was in vogue from the time of Queen Elizabeth to the Victorian age. This all changed as American and European societies became more economically democratic. Now the focus is on getting a tan.
Anyway, what made the 1998 Malkin article about her skin color interesting is that there was a glimmer of an interesting fact about Filipino-American culture in that article. Due to the Civil Rights and Black Power movement of the 60’s Filipinos in the United States began to (via cultural osmosis?) absorb the thinking that dark skin is not necessarily bad. They began to believe that the shape of one’s nose or the waviness of one’s hair are not sources of shame but sources of identity and pride. “Filipino Pride” in the US encompasses brown Filipinos. Just go to any dance club or hiphop hangout where Filipino-Americans hang out and you’d see that brown skin is accepted and Filipinas with “native” features are all the rage. This new level of confidence of what is beautiful and personal identity is also evidenced by the dearth of skin whitening products in the filipino-american community. In contrast, skin whitening is HUGE in the Philippines. Indeed, Colgate-palmolive has a skin whitening line. Moreover, when Filipino-Americans come to the Philippines, there is a wide disparity in terms of personal confidence between dark-skinned Filipino Americans and their local counterparts. Since American culture and Americans in general are held in such high esteem here, the ‘patina’ of being from America innoculates most darker Filipino-Americans from the local discrimination against darker Filipinos. Finally, a rough personal survey of Filipina-white male relationships show American men prefer darker Filipina women. They prefer the “exotic” look of Pinays reminiscent of Gaugin’s paintings. This is very empowering since Filipinas in the Philippines spend a huge sum of money trying to surgically and non-surgically ‘enhance’ their features when men a world away love and admire them for their natural ‘unenhanced’ look. The sad irony. Hence, you see white men dating and marrying Filipinas in the US (and also in the Philippines) who would be deemed “ugly” by contemporary Filipino standards. The aesthetic stone that the Pinoy builders rejected has become the beautiful cornerstone of many Filipino-American households. The SECOND LEVEL of irony is that the Mestizo products of such mixtures are then WORSHIPPED in the Philippines.
Being in America has taught the dark skinned Filipino to love and accept himself/herself. There were some glimmers of that in the Malkin piece.
Comment by Ivy Research — June 24, 2006 @ 6:34 pm
Ivy Research, the things that you talk about are also true in the U.S. Just look at all the African American models and actresses, they are mostly light skinned. The dark skinned actresses are not shown in good light whereas light skinned ones are given the good roles. This focus on light skin is not just limited to Philippines. Maybe Malkin herself believes in such things and this is the reason she married a white man. This way she could have kids that have lighter skin than hers. Maybe she has inferiority complex.
Comment by Tim — June 24, 2006 @ 11:18 pm
I didn’t detect an inferiority complex in this piece. What I did see was a stubborn refusal to concede that Hispanics and blacks might face hurdles that Malkin didn’t have to clear.
Malkin has made a career out of making middle-aged white males feel like they’re the ones who face discrimination. When she sees an opportunity to use her personal biography to bolster her case, she doesn’t hesitate to play her own version of the race card.
But if any liberal mentions her ethnicity, that makes us racists.
Ivy Research–
Thanks for the info. There might be a different explanation for a tendency for Americans to marry darker-skinned Filipinos. Maybe lighter-skinned Filipinos are less likely to seek an American husband, because they have an easier time finding a middle-class husband in the Philippines. You may have noticed how the American wife-shoppers lost no time in descending on Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I find the question interesting, but I don’t know how I’d begin finding an answer.
Comment by gordo — June 25, 2006 @ 12:29 am
As the husband of a Filipina immigrant, I can second what Ivy wrote above. My wife is darker skinned and has often made remarks that lighter skin is better than dark. I always berate her for it, telling her how beautiful she is (and she really is) and that what she is spouting is an ingrained colonialist mindset that equates light skin being good and beautiful and darker skin being ugly and a handicap.
Maybe on some unconscious level Michelle Malkin feels the need for acceptance having been teased a lot when she was a kid by her white classmates. Ironically though, she feels the acceptance she longs for from conservative whites who think she is attractive and exotic looking and who says the things they like to hear. “Hey, look it’s a hot looking Asian babe sticking it to the illegal immigrants from Mexico! You go girl!” If she were just another blue eyed bleached blonde like Ann Coulter, she would not get nearly as much attention as she likes. In the conservative movement though, her looks and ethnicity have become a plus for her. But that’s just my opinion, and I could be wrong.
Comment by Tommykey — June 25, 2006 @ 4:31 pm
To me, it looks less like an “inferiority complex” and more like a revolt against it being imposed upon her. She embraces America because it is America that empowers her in a way that she would not otherwise be in the Philippines, perhaps because she believes that Filipinos themselves feel “inferior” to lighter colored skin. If that’s the case, then maybe she shouldn’t be judged so harshly.
Comment by Northern Cross — August 11, 2006 @ 1:50 pm
Agree with “To me, it looks less like an “inferiority complex” and more like a revolt against it being imposed upon her.”
Comment by Leather Clothes — March 17, 2007 @ 8:35 am
I found most American born Asians belong to one of two extremes. One extreme is like Michelle, very patriotic, against minorities, especially immigrants, always side with conservative whites; believe being treated equally and racism doesn’t exist claim. The other extreme is that they are being oppressed by the society, victims of bigotry or racism, do everything to make sure their minority rights are protected. It seems very few American born Asians are neutral. Those are not extreme seems to be immigrated from foreign countries when they are older, and they are those who can excel in the US.
Comment by Tony — April 5, 2007 @ 2:03 am
Being Filipino myself, not the “mestizo” type Filipino, I know exactly what Michelle is talking about! In the Philippines, there is a “shade-based” perception. If you’re skin is lighter, you’re considered “beautiful.” It’s sad but it is what it is. To those of you who has opinions, they are just that “opinions” and you really can’t understand it unless you’re Filipino or have experienced what she is talking about.
Comment by Shoebug — April 30, 2007 @ 11:48 pm
The idea that there is light-skin/dark skin divisions among Filipinos is not that far fetch at all.Internal racism exists among all groups of color! The lighter skinned-especially mixed blood that are white/person of color- members amongst all groups are perceived better and given special priviledges in opportunities. This phenomenon is not limited to groups of color either. Whites have colorism to. Notice the way blondes are preferenced over brunettes. Remember the young Italian-American supermodel portrayed by Angelina Jolie-Gia Karangi. This was some of Gia Karanjis(not sure if I spelled this correctly) problem. The results may not be as harsh as the consequences dark skin people of color face but it is not surprising people of color face this problem when it is in the white community too when we have been taught by this group to despise ourselves!
Comment by anonymous — September 29, 2008 @ 12:31 am