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What Is It Like to Be Filipino and Foreign in Trump's America?
Florianne Jimenez has lived in the US since 2013, and lived through the watershed 2016 elections that saw Donald Trump take the presidency. What is it like to be brown and foreign in America today?
by
Florianne Jimenez
Aug 16, 2018
Aug 16, 2018
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I lived through the 2016 elections in what is arguably one of the most progressive areas of the United States—a New England college town. It’s the kind of place where there are Black Lives Matter, Free Tibet, and Immigrants Welcome Here signs on every lawn, and where mostly white college students can protest on the streets in protest chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” escorted by police cars. When you’re brown, and you’re not from here, but you live here, you start to believe that your ideologies, your own progressiveness, your drinking the Kool-Aid will keep all the things you hate at a distance. But it won’t.
Last summer, I was walking to a local movie theatre to meet up with some friends, and as I was on the sidewalk, about to round the corner, a car on my side of the street slowed down to match my stride. A head of dark hair leaned into the passenger side and yelled, “DONALD TRUMP, BABY!”.
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I stopped in my tracks. “Donald TRUMP!!!” they shouted again, the last name clearly standing for something that my brown, female body felt but didn’t understand. Before I could get it together, muster up the voice to tell him to fuck off, or take note of a license plate or car make or even a color (red?), they were gone. I looked around, thinking other people on the sidewalk had surely seen or heard, but there was nobody else.
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In the hierarchy of Shitty Things A Person of Color Could Experience, that moment barely registers. They could have yelled something filthier, something more cutting, called me a c-word or a b-word or an actual slur. They could have thrown something at me. They could have been armed. All this person did, really, was make me stop and wonder. It’s not great to be yelled at from a moving car, but it’s not the worst thing either. When I angrily played this moment back to my empathetic friends later that night, it seemed ridiculous to me that I was that angry, or that I even brought it up.
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Being Filipino, and coming from a racially homogenous country, it took years of complex reading and thinking to understand racial oppression in the United States. It took, and will take, more time to understand how we fit into the contemporary picture of the United States. For all my advanced degrees and my theoretical understandings of power and oppression, getting yelled at from a moving car is all I have to explain what it’s like to be Filipina in Trump’s America: It’s not the worst, but it’s not great either.
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In a Trump-led America, many wonder what is going to happen to Asians/Asian Americans in the US under his administration, and within that category, what’s going to happen to Filipinos. When the immigration ban rolled out in 2017, I remember being simultaneously outraged and relieved, which are two emotions that should never exist in tandem. While I was (and still am) disgusted by a whole country’s rejection of entire nationalities, I’m also thankful that seemingly, we’ve flown under the racism radar.
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Filipino American scholars have already written about the relative invisibility and racial ambiguity of Filipinos in the American consciousness. I guess that explains why, at the breakfast table in my Quezon City home, the Entertainment sections of the papers always had a feature on any Filipino who was remotely adjacent to Hollywood. Our narrative is that the world needs to see our best and judge us on those terms. It’s probably why we take cultural ownership of Bruno Mars, but not our practices around domestic helpers.
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Depending on where you are in the US, being a person of color already has varying degrees of precarity. Right now, being Filipino in the US feels like being that kid in class who didn’t do the reading, hoping and praying they won’t get called. I read the numbers on Filipino-American support for Trump, and am disgusted but also weirdly relieved: maybe that will make him like us? I see Duterte and Trump shaking hands, and it makes me wonder if, when another immigration ban rolls around, we will be spared again. In the same vein, I think about my advanced degrees, my comfortable university job, and my American English, and hope that I can lean on them when the time comes.
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