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'.
We actually have the same or very similar reading of the personal decolonization of Fil-Ams. I’m not one myself and I have not encountered a scholarly study on this, but I based my reading on Filomeno Aguilar’s 2025 book on Rizal. The parallels between the ilustrados of the 1890s and today’s diaspora is quite striking. https://www.explorations.ph/p/rizal-wrote-the-playbook-for-diaspora This was why I compared it to antiracism. The oppressive Other becomes the West, so the We and the Kapwa tends to become the non-West, the indigenous.
“Decolonization” appears to have multiple meanings. The one you seem to be referring to is the more institutional one, done though legislation and foreign policy. There’s also “decolonization” that I encounter in academia. This one seems to be more epistemological. There’s also an attempt at bleaching knowledge of colonial pollution. This sounds like the study and promotion of “indigenous knowledge systems” in anthropology. I guess what I referred to in the article is decolonization as it is used in the online diaspora discourse, as shown by the screenshot I used. It is a search for identity, and the answer seems to be informed by “race.” In a world where whiteness is an identity you cannot belong to, the obvious move is to elevate the non-white identity you can belong to. This is structurally the same move the ilustrados made, as well as—and I admit that I am looking at this from a distance—the american antiracist movement.
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'.
We actually have the same or very similar reading of the personal decolonization of Fil-Ams. I’m not one myself and I have not encountered a scholarly study on this, but I based my reading on Filomeno Aguilar’s 2025 book on Rizal. The parallels between the ilustrados of the 1890s and today’s diaspora is quite striking. https://www.explorations.ph/p/rizal-wrote-the-playbook-for-diaspora This was why I compared it to antiracism. The oppressive Other becomes the West, so the We and the Kapwa tends to become the non-West, the indigenous.
“Decolonization” appears to have multiple meanings. The one you seem to be referring to is the more institutional one, done though legislation and foreign policy. There’s also “decolonization” that I encounter in academia. This one seems to be more epistemological. There’s also an attempt at bleaching knowledge of colonial pollution. This sounds like the study and promotion of “indigenous knowledge systems” in anthropology. I guess what I referred to in the article is decolonization as it is used in the online diaspora discourse, as shown by the screenshot I used. It is a search for identity, and the answer seems to be informed by “race.” In a world where whiteness is an identity you cannot belong to, the obvious move is to elevate the non-white identity you can belong to. This is structurally the same move the ilustrados made, as well as—and I admit that I am looking at this from a distance—the american antiracist movement.
Thanks for engaging thoughtfully with the post.