Representations of Whiteness in Manila's Commercial Landscape

into lalux Klan was emerging as a vio-lent force in the American South. Much in the sameway that Southern writers depicted Blacks as savage,wild, and immoral, so too were brown-skinned Fil-ipinos depicted in popular and political discoursesthroughout much of the twentieth century colonialperiod (Tyner 1999, Toribio 2002). The diary of Pvt.Humbleton of the Washington regiment fighting in thePhilippine insurgency recorded this about the Filipinos,“Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill‘niggers’” (Kanouse 2001). Another soldier wrote, “I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on somedark skin and pull the trigger” (LaFeber 1989, p. 203).

Overt racism and presumptions of white superioritywere supported by biologists, social scientists, andgeographers alike who saw the world through a socialDarwinist lens that categorized races into variousstages of civilization and morality (Rafael 2002, Tyner1999). Frye’s Complete Geography textbook from 1898describes people of the Philippines as, “simple childrenof nature who differ in intelligence, beliefs, habits, andmodes of living” (Frye 1901, Special Supplement p. 6)and having “coarse black hair, flat faces and shortskulls… many of whom are but savages” (Frye 1901, p. 102).

Given the circumstances surrounding its uneasyintroduction to American-defined notions of eugeniccategorization, environmental determinism, and itsown 30,000 year history of settlement, language, migra-tion, and human development, it is not surprising that

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Representations of Whiteness inManila’s Commercial Landscape

Manila was occupied and dominated by for-eign powers for nearly four centuries. Much ofthe faded Spanish imprint (1571–1898) uponthe urban landscape still lingers in com-bination and contrast with material markersleft behind by the American colonial periodfrom 1898–1946. Manila’s contemporary com-mercial landscape signifies past colonial domi-nance, but it also embodies a symbolic andliteral longing for whiteness that permeatesmodern Philippine society.

olonial legacies mark the contemporary landscape ofManila in a myriad of ways. Catholic cathedrals,fortresses, and syncretic linguistic markings offer per-sistent reminders of Spain’s imperial legacy. Americancolonialism and patriarchy of the 20th century,however, left an even more indelible mark upon boththe social fabric and the material cityscape of thePhilippines – particularly in the primate city of Manila.While Spain’s efforts focused on building churches andexacting tribute, the American ‘White Man’s Burden’model emphasized the construction of schools, roads,and other infrastructure projects (Anderson 2005,Rafael 1995) as evidenced by city government build-ings, American-style university campuses, Protestantchurches, public schools, golf courses, and countryclubs dotting the national capital region (NCR).

The June 1899 issue of “Judge Magazine” depictsFilipinos as dirty children in need of the harsh butcleansing hand of American democracy, civilization,discipline, and education. A 2004 San Francisco Exhi-bition entitled “The Hidden Book” explored Americanviews of the Philippines as portrayed by political car-toons at the turn of the twentieth century. Such depic-tions reveal that, “While the American colonizers pur-sued their agenda of ‘benevolent assimilation’ in thePhilippines, Filipinos were unaware of how they werebeing portrayed by the American media in the UnitedStates. From 1890 to 1907, the American media com-monly depicted Filipinos either as an incorrigible boy,a savage beast, a monkey, or a clown — blatantlymaligning the Filipino’s indigenous cultural identity”(Toribio 2002).

In fact, the U.S. encounter with the Philippinesoccurred at a time in post-Civil War American historyin which racial divisions were perhaps their starkest.Racial segregation practices had recently been codified

TO D D L I N D L E Y

C

Photo 1: White imagery dominates commercial bill-boards and store fronts in contemporary Manila. Thebottom image contains the message “Tamang puti.Tamang gandi” – “Perfectly white. Perfectly beautiful.”

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Philippine attitudes towards nationalism, identity, race,and more specifically skin color continue to be com-plex and difficult to disaggregate. As the photos in thisessay suggest, however, the commercial urban land-scape in contemporary Manila fixes the Philippine gazefirmly and longingly upon whiteness above all else asan idealized phenotype - to be emulated, desired, andpursued. The very word ‘White’ evokes desire, wealth,sexuality, and power in a variety of product lines fromclothing to cosmetics (Photo 1).

Cosmetic fixationThe photos in this essay come from high traffic sitesthroughout metro Manila, including walkways betweenmass transit stations, malls, storefronts, and majorpedestrian thoroughfares taken over the course of sixmonths from August 2007 to February 2008. Nearly allof the images appear at sites visible from and nearbyone of three light rail terminals that loosely form atriangle connecting the urban periphery to the core.Most images change weekly and others monthly, butregardless of the product, week, or month the theme ofwhite pre-eminence dominates the urban commerciallandscape.

Cosmetic products occupy a privileged and perva-sive space on billboards, and like in other parts of Asia(particularly Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, SouthKorea, and India) and in West Africa, Jamaica, Mexico,and various countries in Latin America and theCaribbean, skin creams such as that in Photo 2 garnerhuge profits based upon their ability (perceived oractual) to whiten skin (August 2008, Fuller 2006).While scholars debate the relationship between colo-nialism and light skin preferences, the products thatcater to this consumer desire have exploded in recentyears where more than fifty new skin-whitening prod-ucts are introduced every year in the Asia Pacific region(Fuller 2006) and corporate strategies specifically tar-get this growing demand as a highly profitable sector inthe market (Poblete 2008). Soaps, cleansers, and evenbasic creams almost all contain some type of lighteningagent, and Photos 3 and 4 speak directly to the assumedcorrelation between beauty and skin color.

The desire for lighter skin is so great that parentssometimes encourage their children to marry foreign-ers, so that their grandchildren may become whiter. Asone upper class woman interviewed for this studyreported, “even though the wife is not so good looking,the children they have are very beautiful! Maybe forsome people the only way they can have blue eyes andthe kind of features they desire is to marry into it!” Thedesire for white skin is matched by equally intenseshame associated with being too dark as illuminated bya 2007 survey on race in which one family repeatedlyscrubbed their darkest child with scouring pads leaving

Photo 2: Pond’s flawless white cream is one out of morethan 100 products marketed in the Philippines and Asiato induce skin whitening

Photo 3: Dermablend soap advertisementsremind consumers that “…beautiful skinneeds more than just cleansing. UseDermablend and be ready for the extraattention!” Bitte Text hinzufügenBitte Text hinzufügenBitte Text hinzufügen

Photo 4: Both regional andglobal companies court un-tapped consumers in a coun-try where whiteness is per-ceived as something to beachieved rather than as a fixedbiological marker.

her with permanent scars and skin tissue damage(Rondilla and Spickard 2007).

Explicit in the promise of whiteness is greater sexappeal, beauty, and desirability, but implicitly the mes-sage runs much deeper. Many of the socioeconomicdisadvantages (lack of job opportunities, racial dis-crimination, and bullying to name a few) associatedwith being dark occur at the individual or householdscale, but at the national scale the preponderance ofbathing agents designed to whiten also seems to offer adeeper promise of ethnic purity – one that will washaway the darkness of poverty, marginalization, humansuffering, violence, and subjugation just as PresidentMcKinley sought to do in 1899. While the U.S. aimedto ‘purify’ an uncivilized nation of racially impuresavages through violence and hegemonic force, con-temporary market forces promise to do so in as little as“7 days” (Photo 5).

While the responsible party for achieving theremoval of impurities has shifted from the colonizer tothe (post) colonized, the goal remains the same. Thequest for whiteness lingers as part of an unfinishedproject even in physical absence of the colonizer. Justas international development initiatives promise tobring prosperity to an otherwise marginalized people,so too does the free market promise to bring whitenessto an otherwise brown population.

During the post-Marcos neoliberal era the Philip-pines has struggled to find its comparative advantage inthe global marketplace. One major growth industry,however, has been the expansion of medical tourismcatering to an international clientele attracted by well-trained but poorly paid health care professionals.Major shopping malls throughout Manila offer a varietyof cosmetic services including collagen implants andskin whitening. Photo 6 captures one skin whiteningcenter located in the Ayala Metro Rail Terminal atMakati, Manila’s upscale business district, where themajority of foreign expats and Filipino elite congregate,socialize, and do business.

Cosmetic clinics attract customers from wealthierregional neighbors such as Singapore, Taiwan, andSouth Korea, but beauty enhancement services haveexperienced domestic growth as well. Many in Manila’supwardly mobile middle class work in Makati in CallCenters or other outsourced business activities thatbring workers in regular close contact with managers,partners, and customers from the Global North, so per-haps it is unsurprising that the quest for wealth, West-ern-style consumption, and whiteness should operateunder the same set of desires. Longings for whitenessare not unique to the Philippines, and they can befound operating in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, HongKong and in particular Thailand, where middle classwomen spend 10 % of their annual income on skin care(August 2008).

That these desires figure so prominently on Manilabillboards is not surprising, and yet many foreignersand overseas Filipinos express dismay when they firstencounter the onslaught of ads for skin whiteners thatappear immediately outside of the Manila airport and

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Photo 5: Before and after pictures demonstrate the powerful and rapidpurifying potential of whitening products even when whiteness is notexplicitly mentioned

Photo 6: Skin whitening and cosmetic surgery centers abound in Manila’sshopping malls. This clinic resides in the Ayala Metro Rail Terminal

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continue throughout the city (McFerson 2002). Besidesthe negative social and psychological implications ofthe practice, the long-term health effects, althoughlargely unknown, have been described by some doctorsas a ticking time bomb (Fuller 2006). Skin whiteningagents often contain mercury derivatives long associat-ed with kidney and speech problems as well as hydro-quinone, which in large doses can lead to problemswith hemoglobin and have deleterious effects on thenervous system and may be carcinogenic (Ntambwe2004).

Postcolonial forms of whitenessWhile questions of race factored into the Spanish colo-nial project, skin color was secondary to class and placeof birth, but the Philippines became part of the Ameri-can empire at a time when putative science categorizednations and peoples into various stages of civilizationaccording to skin color, climatic region, skull size, andother hypothetical eugenic classifications (Tyner 2000,Rafael 2000). Simultaneously, symbols of Americanbenevolence and good will (e.g. monuments dedicatedto the American war effort, American flags, images ofAmerican missionaries and teachers arriving in remoteparts of the country) were thrust upon the newest mem-bers of the emergent American empire. Many such sym-bols were invariably detached from the daily realities ofsubtropical island life, but today the urban postcoloniallandscape still bears countless markers of such discon-nected iconography, such as this pale-skinned, white-bearded old man driving a sleigh dressed in fur to pro-tect him from ice and snow (Photo 7).

Spanish conquest, while immersed in the pursuit ofreligious conversion was never particularly interestedin assimilation, and so Spanish secular cultural mark-ers did not really diffuse to the masses (McFerson 2002,

Rafael 1995). Such was not the case with the Ameri-cans who imported Santa Claus, basketball, the Englishlanguage, Protestantism, compulsory schooling, andthe art of political campaigning. The image shown heredemonstrates the ongoing fusion of interests betweenlocal elites and foreign powers such that the gifts ofdemocracy and cultural ‘advancement’ were andcontinue to be tied to a particular set of cultural normsconstructed by the colonizer but bestowed upon thecolonized as a distinct part of the benevolent assimila-tion project. In post-colonial Philippines, the “contentsof the colonial unconscious remain active as thepathogenic nucleus – the very crux – of this postcolo-nial quandary of whiteness” (Lopez 2001, p. 90).

Photo 7: Santa Claus, basketball, Christmas trees, and local election campaigns are among the large basket of materi-al cultural markers imported by Americans during the period of “Benevolent Assimilation” (1898-1946)

Photo 8: Romanticized images of the American Western Frontier are juxta-posed with the grim realities of squatter settlement life in the contemporaryManila periphery

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Photo 9: Located inside the Gilmore LRT station, this “Great Australian Invention” plays heavily upon national consumer base that oftenviews foreign (particularly white) innovations as superior

Photo 10: Roadside billboard of Canadian Kids

Photo 11: Inside Manila’s domestic air terminal, the good life is portrayed as the (perhaps) Filipina gazes longingly at the (seemingly) foreign man dressedcompletely in white

The construction of national identity invariably re-quires nostalgic revisions of an imagined past, but post-colonial settings often draw upon reconfigured storiesfrom foreign places such as the case in Photo 8, wherevernacular visions of the American West are exploitedfor commercial gain through the sale of cigarettes to apeople with almost no cows, no rodeos, and certainlyno Western frontier.

Many of the billboard images across Manila, how-ever, rely heavily upon consumers’ familiarity with andstrong desire for something foreign. Liberalized marketpolicies have led to a barrage of imported consumergoods that invariably are presented as superior and areaccompanied by the “superior” white faces and bodiesof those from outside of the country. Australian straws(Photo 9), Canadian children’s clothes (Photo 10)and Korean plasma televisions (Photo 11) are just asmall sampling of products promoted with the alluringcoalescence of wealth and whiteness.

Globalized forms of whiteness“Defining whiteness is really difficult… Ethnicity mightmatter but race doesn’t matter to white people. Andthat is part of what whiteness is. It’s not having tothink about being in the norm or dominant group.Beyond that, it is also a sense of privilege, a sense thatthis society is stacked in your favor and you can doanything, because the American society, the Americaneconomy, is sort of like a banquet and you can keepgoing up for more helpings. That is your system. Itbelongs to you. So there is a sense of entitlement thatcomes with whiteness.”

Dalton Conley, Director of the Center for AdvancedSocial Science Research in an interview in 2003. Editedtranscript from “RACE – The Power of an Illusion”.PBS Documentary

Hegemonic forces utilize various forms of oppressionincluding but not limited to political, economic, mili-tary, and cultural modes of power and resistance(Lopez 2001). The last foreign military base in thePhilippines was closed in 1991, drawing to an officialclose the American neo-colonial era as the countrytransitioned away from U.S. backed Ferdinand Marcos’dictatorial rule and moved into a state of post-colonial-ism. One anthem from the 1986 People Power revolu-tion, which finally toppled the dictator’s regime, was asong called “American Junk” which stirred an emo-tional response in Philippine nationals to reject Ameri-can interference, pop culture, and music in favor ofdirect political participation, a re-awakening of Philip-pine culture, and an appreciation of indigenous artforms. Nevertheless, pop culture iconography ubiqui-tously appears across global cities like Manila, andmany Filipinos feel disillusioned by the past twenty-fiveyears following the revolution that has witnessed onePresident after another riddled with scandal and recur-rent institutional abuses of power and graft. As thecountry seeks to participate in and gain the acceptanceof the global commerce community, it also clings to

a traditional past. Time-space compression (Harvey1989) associated with 21st century globalization con-tinues to bring traditional cultures into direct conflictwith an ever changing popular culture, and this battle isembodied in the material landscape of contemporaryManila.

Much has been written about perceptions, livedexperiences, and the ideological struggles that emergein a postcolonial society over the issues of race, domi-nation, and independence (Bhaba 1994, Lopez 2001,Said 1978), but the material markers in the visible land-scape of such struggles have been understudied. Streetimagery such as that found in this roadside market(Photo 12) attests to and divulges something verypowerful about the complex and dialectical nature ofboth lingering and long lasting colonial imprints (suchas Catholicism) as well as the fickle but powerful effects

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Photo 12: Folk and popular culture collide and coalesce in the images sold bythis street vendor in Baclaran Market, in Manila’s urban core

of global capital and popular culture. While it tookJesus’ image more than a millennium to gain worldwidepopularity and recognition, pop star Britney Spears’image managed the same notoriety within her ownshort lifetime. (The price to purchase Jesus and BritneySpears in this market was the same!)

While other pop icons (such as Elvis in Photo 13)frequently appear on billboards in Manila, manyimages seem to be less American and more symbolic ofa global, generic form of whiteness. Perfume, fashion,shoes, and a plethora of other products are marketedwith white faces and bodies not easily distinguishableas American, Australian, German, or European. In-stead they seem to represent the cosmopolitan face ofthose wealthy nations in the highest phase of econom-ic development – those that enjoy mass consumption,free flow of movement across borders, and easy accessto all of the world’s most valuable resources. Images ofFilipinos also appear readily on billboards, but for thoseproducts that utilize (what appear to be) Philippine orat least Asian looking models, closer examinationreveals that very often they are accompanied by theapproving gaze of foreigners, such as the case in Photo 14. In addition, models with light skin, narrownoses, and blonde hair (Photo 15) are chosen over theirdarker skinned compatriots to represent products asglamorous, beautiful, and desirable.

Newscasters, beauty queens, and actors who arelighter skinned, enjoy a distinct social and economicadvantage that invariably is tied to a long and com-

plex history of conquest, domination, and influencefrom external entities (Rondilla and Spickard 2007,McFerson 2002, Rafael 2000). World class hotels pre-fer to hire lighter skinned staff members, and evenlighter skinned orphans are more readily adopted andcared for than darker skinned children (Lindley 2008).Questions about how these tendencies originated andhow Spanish and American colonialism and neocolo-nialism contributed to such affinities are difficult todisentangle, but the quest for whiteness is global andnot unique to this one urban environment.

ConclusionClass consciousness in Manila is tightly intertwinedwith race, ethnicity, economic standing, and space(McFerson 2002). The throngs of those in squattersettlements have more pressing daily concerns than thetint of their skin, and the growth of whitening con-sumer products accentuates wealth disparities in acountry where 30 % live below the poverty line and20 % are undernourished. Yet those who pass throughthe city on highways or along light rail lines and thosewho drive cars and frequent the multitude of mega-malls dotting the capital region are regularly bombard-ed with messages that reinforce notions of whiteness asprivileged and perfect.

Human geography very often clings to the idea thatethnicity is a process of self-definition while race is tiedto biological traits passed from one generation to the

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Photo 13: A Philippine Elvis promotes Dunkin’ donuts as “pasalubong” or homecoming treats

next (Johnston et al. 2005). Within such a framework,the quest for whiteness would be nothing more than anempty pursuit of the unobtainable. But as evidenced bythe contemporary commercial cityscape of Manila, thequest, the longing, and the desire for whiteness contin-ues unabated by those Filipinos seeking financialstability, upward mobility, and most of all elite socialstatus in the 21st century global community. In spite ofgroundbreaking DNA studies that unequivocally find“no consistent patterns of genes to distinguish one racefrom another” and “no genetic basis for divisions ofhuman ethnicity” (Human Genome Project 2007),many are still (and will continue to be) bound by ill-conceived and socially constructed 19th centurydefinitions of race and ethnicity that continue in the21st century to perpetuate marginality, poverty, anddiscrimination for those with darker skin. ■

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Frye, A.E. 1901: Frye’s Complete Geography. BostonFuller, T. 2006: Glamour at a price in Asia. International Herald Tribune,

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Todd LindleyDepartment of Geography, SB 120Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 / [email protected]

Author

Photo 14: Department store posters often place Asian models with images ofaccepting foreigners

Photo 15: Shopping seems to be much more fun(and abundant) when shoppers are fair skinned,tall, and blonde than for the majority of Filipinoswith darker skin and flatter noses