It was an American friend who alerted me to the brewing controversy. Early Wednesday morning he sent a text message on how BBC “picked up on the story about Bela Padilla on the FHM cover with two (painted) black women.”
I don’t follow celebrity news so I didn’t even know who Bela Padilla was (I learned later she’s an actress and a niece of Robin Padilla), but I thought I’d check out what this was all about. Within a few minutes after getting the text, there I was on the BBC website and indeed, item No. 1 on the “Most Watched/Read” list was “FHM Philippines scraps cover in racist storm.” One click and I was reading an article about the incident, and listening to an interview with Bela Padilla that had been broadcast on BBC.
I feel this was indeed a “storm” but not a big one, the controversy bound to die down almost as quickly as it erupted. Thursday morning when I checked the BBC site, it had disappeared from the “Most Watched/Viewed” list, replaced by “Kitten rescued from freeway,” “Mattress dominoes break record” and “Sinking horse pulled from mudflats.” I’m mentioning this in part to show that both the appetite for sensational news and short attention spans are global, even for usually staid BBC viewers and listeners.
Nevertheless, I’m writing about this issue because it does raise the question of racism and the Filipino. FHM and Bela Padilla kept repeating that they meant no harm or malice in the cover. “Honestly,” Bela would begin nearly every other sentence during her interview.
‘Coming of age’
But that’s jumping ahead of the story. Here’s a quick recap of what happened:
Last weekend FHM, one of those “lad mags,” or magazines mainly catering to men, featured a preview of its March issue cover on its Facebook site. It showed Bela in a pink bikini and, in the dark background, almost invisible, three “black” models also in bikinis. I put black in quotation marks because Bela explained in her BBC interview that the models had been “painted” that color. The caption on the cover read: “Bela Padilla Stepping out of the Shadows.” It was in the BBC interview where Bela explained that she and FHM wanted to show her “coming of age,” a change in her image toward an older and presumably more mature Bela.
The Facebook posting immediately drew criticism from visitors to the site, including claims that the photograph was racist. It seems there was enough of an outcry to cause FHM to quickly respond and announce a dramatic decision. In a posted statement, it said the comments made the magazine “reexamine the cover.” Its decision?
“When FHM hits the stands in March it will have a different cover… We apologize and thank those who have raised their points. We apologize to Bela Padilla for any distress this may have caused her,” it said. The statement ends: “In our pursuit to come up with edgier covers, we will strive to be more sensitive next time.”
I looked at several Internet sites and there were many comments posted, some quite revealing in the way they were missing the point about racism. Many went along the argument “But white really is more beautiful.” BBC’s Mishal Hussein, who conducted the interview with Bela, did mention at one point that perhaps the lack of recognition that the cover was racist, and the models being painted black, made things worse.
That Wednesday afternoon I had a graduate class on research methods and one of my students said he wanted to analyze the exchanges on the Internet to examine how Filipinos look at race. He connected his laptop to the Internet, got the controversial FHM cover on the screen, and passed it around for his classmates to scrutinize. One student, an African-American, had not heard about the incident. Her classmates watched as she looked at the cover. Her verdict? She didn’t think it was racist, but could understand that maybe with the caption, it could be. She did add that having lived in the Philippines for 20 years now, she is amazed at how a preference for white skin has grown through the years, with supermarkets and drugstores carrying more and more lotions, soaps and other products with skin-whitening claims.
‘Isms’
I steered the discussion to a discussion of the term “racism.” Since the 19th century we’ve been living with all kinds of “isms,” racism and sexism being two prime examples. An “ism” is ideological, a way of representing the world, society, and social relationships. Ideologies involve distortions, more specifically, an assertion of superiority and inferiority—for example, a statement is said to involve sexism if it suggests one “race” is innately superior to the other. I put race in quotation marks because this is actually a concept that has no biological basis. Scientific research over the last 20 years around genes and DNA have shown there are more differences among people within one so-called “race” than between one race and another.
We think there are differences because we are socialized to look for the superficial differences, mainly in skin color but often extended to facial features (e.g., “singkit” eyes), body conformation, and even body smell. The differences are highlighted to separate “us,” who want to imagine being superior physically and morally, from “them.” In a reversal of white racism, for example, we have our “God the racial baker” myth—God using an oven to create humans and getting it wrong with Caucasians (half-baked) and blacks (burnt) before finally getting a perfect brown cookie, the Filipino.
The story of God the baker is funny and is related tongue-in-cheek. But it is racist, too, presuming one perfect “race” and others as imperfect. And while “whites” are seen as imperfect, the brunt of jokes and discrimination is directed at Negritos and anyone else who’s dark.
Ideologies are powerful in the way they are built into our consciousness, so that we no longer become aware of our biases, unable to see what’s wrong with using women painted black as a background to a woman with very fair skin. The caption sends an even stronger message of the “black” models as shadows, black not just as dark-skinned but as darkness.
I never liked political correctness, which can become almost ritualistic and as mindless as the ideologies they try to counter. But when it comes to racism, we need to be much more thoughtful about what we say and depict in the mass media. We suffered, grievously, from the racism of Spanish and American colonial masters and our overseas Filipinos continue to suffer from racism in many countries, sometimes even inflicted physical harm simply because we are perceived as belonging to an inferior “race.”
The Filipino diaspora will mean many more “hyphenated” Filipinos: Fil-Am, Fil-British, Fil-Iranian, Japinoy and so on. We need not become color-blind; instead, we should recognize those differences and rather than think of one being better, more beautiful, than the other, we should learn to appreciate, even celebrate, the diversity that makes us Filipino.
(Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph)