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…