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:
This stumbled on my homepage and I thought it was an interesting read, but I just wanted to add a brief comment here for others who are curious about decolonization and may see this post in the future. Decolonization as a historical process is a shared experience across almost every country that struggled to be independent from a larger empire. Most modern nations have their own histories and even internal debates over how to differentiate themselves from others, such as their neighbors for example, partly as a way to rally citizens around an identity that a national community can blossom from. In other words, to 'decolonize' partly stems from a desire to make one's nation their own, and not merely remain an appendage to foreign empire.
I disagree with this post's framing of decolonization as best understood through the lens of racial politics and 'antiracism'. In its primary historical sense, decolonization as a process has often been less about culture and more about breaking economic and political bonds of dependence developed during the 'colonial' era. In postcolonial histories, the modern 'era of decolonization' usually starts from the end of World War II to around 1975. So for the Philippine context, comparative decolonization studies would actually focus more on our independence from the United States in 1946. To go further, one might even argue that the actual 'distraction' is promoting directionless debate over cultural decolonization as it confines the notion of decolonization to the cultural sphere.
But it is true that some people online do argue over cultural decolonization. For me, I think it's more interesting to consider those topics in terms of American influence rather than that of the Spanish. Our national symbols, educational curricula, political systems, and the adoption of common mandated languages were arguably officially institutionalized and standardized during the American colonial period. Although I am not so familiar with online Fil-Am discourse, I suspect that it's shaped by the incongruity of living in the country that once colonized your ancestors for half a century. I suspect that the desire to push for being "more Filipino" by adopting indigeneity comes from wanting to bleach their souls of colonial dirt and return to a primordial pre-colonial state of bliss. This image has its own issues as well, but I don't think it's fair to reduce this impulse to racism, 'reparative racism', or so-called 'antiracism'.