What Filipino Cops Taught Me About Racism

It was in a village where I felt it most of all. Dark children huddled around me, pushing and pressing against each other. A million tiny fingers pointed and mouths opened in laughter.

“Negrito! Negrito,” they chanted, and already I could feel myself leaving my body, floating away.

In the Aeta villages of the Philippines, I roamed past shacks of dark-skinned families with tattered clothes, no food, and no schooling. In their kinky hair and dark skin, I saw myself, but as they pointed at me and laughed, something deeper in me became hard to contain.

“You’ll find our people there,” my black friend who had visited the Aeta people a year before had said to me.

By the time I visited some of the Aeta villages, I’d been in the Philippines, a part of the world I’d never expected to explore, for three months. Manila, the concrete wonder, reminded me so much of certain parts of my summers as a child in Jamaica. The beaches were white and the waters were blue. People kept bandanas in their bags to cover their children’s mouths to filter out air pollution. On the city streets, coconut water and the laughter of old men was plentiful.

I’d expected to see poverty and the other consequences of colonialism in Southeast Asia and to be humbled by seeing it. I hadn’t expected, however, to be humbled by the strange humiliation it is to be a black American abroad.