The Day I Realized I am Racist
The discovery of self is not always beautiful, sometimes it’s hideous that it’s difficult to understand and describe with words.
I imagine it coming in the morning — the little demons we hide behind the shadows on the lines and creases of a weathered face or a forgiving smile.
I don’t know how our brain decides to leave our mind so bare, but somehow it always pulls all the toxic cycles of thoughts that we couldn’t entertain yesterday and the ones that we allowed to win over us last night at the wee hours of the day. At this point, I don’t know what we try to awaken in ourselves first with the coffee that we make — our body or our consciousness.
But perhaps we entertain all these demons in the morning because it’s in the morning that we decide what face to wear.
And just like any morning, I couldn’t decide what demons to face: hesitation or denial.
You see, I couldn’t accept that I am an enabler of discrimination and that I am potentially a racist. I couldn’t fully recognize that I may have sold my own people for my writing.
Here, I stop. I try to think of a memory that could possibly soften the truth of these thoughts. Perhaps I did it unknowingly, or maybe there were valid reasons for this discrimination. I try to validate my actions, and then I try to invalidate the situation, but there is no way around injustice.
I am left with an empty, unmoved heart by this realization. I don’t know how to accept it and can’t decide what to do with it. So, I continued to lie down in the dimly lit room.
There is just me, the crickets, a long shadow to my right, and the sound of blanket on skin. After a while, the azan for the morning prayer joined in. So, I sit up, prepare to fulfill my prayers, and start my day.
The Badjaos are an old tale in our province. I have written about them many times, and I fancy myself an empathizer of their tribe. I believe I am a proud person who shares their language and loves their unique culture. However, a recent visit to their community for my on-going academic research made me understand that I had been selective in my empathy and sentiment.
As sea gypsies, the Badjaos are known to rely on fishing for their livelihood, but recent shifts in their employment made me and my friends, who happen to be colleagues as well, curious, and so we decided to conduct a research about this. We proposed the research to a reputable organization in our region, the Bangsamoro Youth Commission.
I and my friends worked together to prepare for the interview and focused group discussion (FGD). We sent out letters to two Badjao communities and printed out the materials needed.
My assigned task is to lead the discussion, which was the first part of the data gathering procedure. This is because I am the only full-blooded Sama (a related tribe to the Badjaos) in the group and the only one who is fluent in the language used by the respondents.
Before we proceed, however, I must tell you how I understand my relationship with the Badjaos, and for that, I’m going to need a cup of coffee.
Here, I proceed to the kitchen and watch the transition of colors in the sky from dusky orange to warm, lazy blue. The whole neighborhood is starting to wake up as well, because I can hear the clanging of kitchen wares, the greetings of the chickens, some Malaysian songs and Qur’an recitations being played somewhere, the passing of a few tricycles, and the slow, satisfied purrs of the cats in our house as they stretch and wake up.
And then, I grabbed the kettle and boiled some water.
When I was younger, one of the first presence I heard in the morning was the call of the Badjaos who were going from house to house to sell fish.
They would come with a basket full of what they caught last night and bargain with my mother or grandmother on the price.
In other islands, they would not ask to be paid with money but with water or food instead.
Since childhood, I always saw them as people who were inferior in social class. Whenever I see them pass by, they always have fish in their hands, their clothes torn and faded, layered over each other so that they can protect themselves from the sun since they will be going around the houses the whole day.
When they go to people’s houses, they are not always welcomed because they smell of fish and seawater.
I grew up witnessing other people mocking and sometimes verbally abusing them. But I didn’t understand that there was anything wrong with it because it has how it’s always been.
When they got offended by people’s taunting and mockery and fought back or showed any negative reaction, people ironically found offense. The Badjaos will then be subjected to even more degrading words, and are made out to be the villain. The narrative is always not in their favor. It is as though to say that the Badjaos don’t have the right to be offended.
The Badjaos, by ethnicity, are my tribe’s brothers and sisters because we speak the same language and our ancestors followed the same lifestyle.
The only difference that led to the drastic positions of the two tribes in society is that later, the Badjaos settled on the seas, while my tribe settled on land or forests.
My tribe advanced with technology and society, while the Badjaos were selective about what they accepted from the world. Because of this, most of their communities lack the modern necessities of life, and hold varying beliefs and practices.
I grew up with all these backgrounds, but there was a point in my life when I recognized that everything about how the community treats the Badjaos was wrong.
However, it took me more years to understand that it doesn’t stop with recognizing the problem.
A heavy sigh escaped me when I come to this point. It becomes difficult to organize my thoughts when I am struck with the realization that I have been a hypocrite this whole time.
So I pace myself. To start, I made myself a cup of native kahawa, the strongest black coffee we have.
Before going to the Badjao community, I expected to talk to immature teenage girls because our target respondents were youths. I expected to have a difficult time encouraging them to cooperate and take the interview seriously. I also expected that the whole process would take more time than necessary because I believed they had no sense of organization. However, I was surprised when I was faced by fairly decent people.
You see, all of my encounters with Badjaos have left me with the impression that they only and always care about money because I had been duped by them. They would ask for cash advances and inform me that they could not wash the laundry for a few days because of cultural obligations on their islands, but they would not come back at all.
The young women we hired as helpers would also have the annoying habit of leaving without telling us where they would be or what time they would be back.
They would only be interested in talking about superficial things and are whiny. They would also not hide their dissatisfaction when they couldn’t get what they wanted. Sometimes they would roll their eyes and even glare, if not at you, then at anything that’s in front of them. Aside from that, they simply annoy me.
So, I felt ashamed, and I cringed inwardly when I met the respondents, who were humble, attentive, and friendly. It was a new impression.
At the beginning of the interview, they were shy. No one wants to answer first, and they only talked when I addressed them directly.
As the interview went on, I slowly became comfortable because they were very cooperative. They would not be shy about telling me the truth, and we giggled at some answers that were so blunt and straightforward.
At one point, I noticed that they, too, were wary of us. I learned later that this is because they understand how people outside their tribe see them. They know how we look at them, and this made me guilty.
However, as the interview became lighthearted and fun because of our constant encouragement for them to express themselves freely, the respondents slowly opened up and became comfortable too.
We started sharing jokes here and there, and some of them would help us encourage the other women to elaborate their answers. A few of them who could not express themselves properly were also encouraged to pace themselves slowly and take their time answering. This made the discussion productive and successful in establishing rapport with the respondents.
My thoughts are interrupted here by the sudden call of beyang, the Badjao, who is working for us to wash our laundry. Beyang is not her name, it’s their term for “friend”. They call strangers that way, and so we also use it to address them. It’s not in their nature to ask names, and when we ask theirs, it’s usually complicated because they wouldn’t know what to tell you — their birth name or nickname.
I asked beyang to wait while I called my sister to help her prepare the clothes to be washed. After this, I went up to my room with my kahawa and got ready for work.
The most important thing I learned from the interview is the Badjaos’ perspective on life. There were a lot of points in the interview and discussion where we would ask succeeding questions because there was an answer, theory, or assumption that we would like to confirm, but they gave us straightforward, shallow answers.
It was during the discussion on the second community that I understood the shallow answers. It wasn’t because they couldn’t express themselves properly or that they were getting tired of the conversation, but because in their lives, that answer is a stark reality, and the truth.
For instance, there was this one question that we always stretched and asked for elaboration on because we weren’t satisfied with the answers. But also because we couldn’t understand why that was the answer or their option in life.
It was about why there were so many of them who stopped going to school.
Most of them dropped out of school because they got involved romantically with someone. We asked why this was a reason to stop, and they giggled, either because the question is silly or the answer is.
They told us that it’s just how it is — you stop going to school when you start seeing someone. They accepted that falling in love and pouring your time into that person is a natural part of life. It was sillier to pretend that the two lovers can still focus on school when they’re already seeing each other on a daily basis.
We weren’t satisfied with this, and so we asked them to elaborate, and they would give answers like, “Because they’re already seeing each other.” To us, this is not a “correct” answer. We know education doesn’t stop just because we started dating. But it was after I noticed their uneasiness and annoyance with the repeated questions that I understood that this is how they see life.
I tried to imagine myself in their shoes to understand this. When you can’t even eat three times a day, you can’t afford basic necessities like medicine, you don’t understand the fuss about education, and you are satisfied with your income and job because those are the only ones you can apply to, all you’re ever going to consider as the next stage of life is marriage.
From here, I was able to piece together a glimpse of how they see life — how they understand education, money, relationships, opportunities, and many others.
All this time, I thought of Badjaos as lazy, opportunistic, ungrateful, and dirty. And all these impressions and judgments made me see everyone of them that way, but the truth really is they do not have much option in life. The way that they think and act are crippled versions of what they truly want.
There was even a time when I didn’t want to be associated with them because, to me, they’re less than the people in my tribe.
Still, I would claim to be their brethren. I would be proud to talk about them and their uniqueness as though they were my tribe’s. I would write stories and pieces about them and would actually receive praise for these, all while hating them at the same time.
There came a time when I was more interested in mining their stories for my projects than in actually listening.
It’s actually what I’ve learned the most from the experience: listening.
It was when the interview came to a point where they were comfortable and told us their stories, sorrows, and worries that I learned how to listen to them. I realized that they have always waited for people to listen, I heard this in the eagerness of their voice.
When we were on the last question and asked them about how they think the government can help them or what aid they would like to receive, most of them said education for their children. Not food, clothes, jobs, or business for themselves, but education for their children.
My heart melted for these young mothers.
I felt relieved and guilty during the interview. I am relieved because I am finally realizing the double standards I held in the Sama community, and guilty because I learned the faces of the people I bullied, whether directly or indirectly.
That day, I learned that my hateful words reached them and that when I offended one of them, I wounded them all.
I learned that when I insulted and belittled them, I separated them from their society because they did not feel it was a healthy place to exist.
I learned that when I laughed at their intonation, clothes, dirty skins, and sun-tanned hairs, I made them hate themselves for something they could not control and should be proud of.
Worst of all, I learned that I could have helped them many times and that I have the capacity to connect them to aid, but I chose to alienate them.
I paused my thoughts for a second and let this last line sink in. I want it to grate on my skin and leave a mark so that I will always remember it. I then sipped the kahawa, grabbed my veil, undercap, and some pins to start wrapping my head with the hijab, and continued with my musings.
I know that most of my people see Badjaos as an extension of the community but not a part of it. Badjaos are that one annoying presence in the crowd. Still, the irony is that people in the province can’t get enough of their culture, which is always featured on every important occasion as a theme or motif.
Like I said before, most people would not look at them but at their culture, their arts, their lifestyle, their stateless identity, the unique and rare tepo they weave, and the vibrant colors of their clothes, but never at them.
It is a sad reality, and it breaks me how we mine and benefit from the identities of the people we should have loved. Ones who had been waiting to be heard and listened to.
I looked at myself one last time in the mirror, checked the “Researcher” label at the back of my shirt, and made sure that my hijab was pinned properly before I proceeded to gather my papers for the presentation of the research.
Racism is, indeed, a scary idea, especially when it is translated into action and adapted as a standard or way of thinking. Even after recognizing it, my mind is still hazy because it’s not used to these kinds of thoughts about Badjaos, and I’m afraid that I will slip back any day now.
In fact, even though I realized that I am racist, even though I hold genuine disgust for myself and have a sincere desire for goodness for the Badjaos, I still wonder whether this presentation is for them or for me.
