Decolonization is a distraction from the real enemy
I just made my first post in a Philippine history FB group. I actually just reposted this Substack note from last year. After reading Oona Paredes’ account of early missionaries in Mindanao in A Mountain of Difference, I was curious why these clerics seemed so different to the friarocracy at the end of the colonial era.
It got a lot of likes and appreciative comments. However, I’d like to riff on this comment.
I frequently encounter the political/moral stance of decolonization from Filipino-Americans in Instagram. My understanding is that this stems from their lived experience of white supremacy, and decolonization is a way of mustering a political movement against it. I never lived in the US, so I’ll just take their word that this is a real enemy and organizing through the lens of race is the right tactic.
This tactic is tried and tested. This is exactly what the ilustrados and the katipuneros did to fight colonial Spain, as Filomeno Aguilar meticulously presents in his 2025 book Jose Rizal, Nationhood, and Anticolonial Imagination (eg, Rizal’s precolonial Eden in his annotation in De Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, and Bonifacio’s interpretation of the blood compact in his Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog). I wrote about Aguilar’s book:
Aguilar also presents the cost of this tactic. “Race” was a Western invention central to the colonial project: Spanish authorities used racial categories to determine tribute, organize social hierarchy, and control the population. You see how artificial race is by the disappearance of “mestizo sangley” into normal Filipino after fiscal reforms shifted taxation away from race-based classification. But the ilustrados could not fully escape the racial framework they inherited. In constructing the Filipino as a civilized “Malay” race, they privileged the Christian lowland peoples while excluding Negritos, Igorots, other upland groups, and much of non-Christian Mindanao as primitive or uncivilized. Colonial racism was therefore not simply defeated; part of its hierarchy was carried into the Filipino nation itself.
This was the paradox of racial nationalism: the same framework that excluded some peoples enabled indios, mestizos, and creoles to imagine themselves as one Filipino people. This is structurally similar to today’s “antiracist” movement in the US. the most sensible explanation of antiracism I’ve heard is from this Black professor I chanced upon in Instagram: antiracism is not the ending of racism but a kind of “reparative” racism which attempts to restructure power to benefit oppressed identities (black and brown) and deny power to their oppressor (whites).
This reduction of people into colors or flags is characteristic of modern mass movements. We see this locally. Pinklawans/Dilawans versus the (former) uniteam of Red + Green. Another characteristic of modern mass movements is the need for a devil. As we read in the seminal work on mass movements, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” The simpler the Schelling point—skin color, a flag, or a common enemy—the larger the mass it can unite.
This is likely why people whose mission is defined by a mass movement—who belong to a color—can’t stand their devil being humanized. Leni/BBM/Digong must stay a devil. For decolonialists, the friar or anyone involved in the colonization cannot be humanized. They must remain devils.
The cost of this, as Aguilar observes in his book, is that we are trapped in victimhood. It is as if our ancestors had no agency.
I’d add another cost. The Spanish empire is long dead. The Philippine Revolution has achieved its goal of a Philippine nation-state more than a hundred years ago. By keeping colonization as the demon that will unite us, we will keep blaming the past for the troubles of the present. Not only are we denying agency to our ancestors; we are denying agency to ourselves. White supremacy and neocolonization might be real forces of oppression, and perhaps Fil-Ams are right to keep on using racism to fight racism. But if you are currently in the Philippines, decolonialization keeps you fighting a century-old ghost when your real oppressor is right in front of you:
