What exactly, are the roots of racism?

“Are all the Filipinos poor?” The man sitting beside me in the bus turned to me and asked.

I looked at his face to check if he was joking. The man, also an Asian, was serious. He actually wanted to know. Although I found his question ignorant and offensive, I didn’t say so. Instead, I asked him back: “Are all citizens from your country poor?”

He didn’t think so. I held my tongue after that. I got off on the next stop still upset about the man’s question. That interaction happened twenty years ago. I’ve thought about the incident every now and then; thought about various snide ways of answering him. I always come back to the conclusion that perhaps I should have told him that not all Filipinos are poor, instead of feeling insulted and defensive.

I could have told him that the very rich and the very poor Filipinos usually stay back home. That the rich ones didn’t need to leave the country to find a better life, while the very poor aren’t educated enough and didn’t have the wherewithal to pay their way out. That the Filipinos he meets in Canada are what I would call the adventurous, the middle, the educated class. These include the nannies.

I’ve experienced other expressions of racism since then, some of which were ironically well-meaning. A long time ago, a friend told me that her car broke down in the middle of the Lions Gate Bridge. Said bridge only has three lanes, the middle of which changes direction every twenty minutes or so. It’s one of the two bridges that connect our town to the mainland. Traffic on this bridge notoriously reaches bottle-neck proportions during rush hours. My friend’s car was caught in one of these bottlenecks. Fortunately she was able to steer her car out of the bridge into a safe shoulder.

“Otherwise, I could have been lynched!” relieved, she recounted her experience to me. Then to make sure I understood her, she inquired, “By the way, do you know what ‘lynched’ means?”

Bad question. I was young and rather proud of my fluency in English. I remember giving her three synonyms for ‘lynched’ in one breath. After that, she never assumed I would misunderstand her ever again. We remain close friends.

I’d been in conversations where a Caucasian would speak to me very, very, slowly, word by word, so that I’d get his point. Whenever this happened, I rudely interrupt the speaker by finishing their sentence for them. That usually shuts them up.

I’ve actually lost my temper and shouted at people for being racist to me, at least twice. I’ve now regretted having done so. Forgive me. At the time, though, I found it very satisfying to watch the objects of my anger being rendered speechless with shock. I’m sure they’ve never seen a little brown person explode in their presence before .

Through the years, I’ve grown more tolerant of people’s false assumptions regarding Filipinos, or of other races, for that matter. I myself have been guilty of subscribing to ethnic stereotypes and although I don’t say them aloud, I definitely think them. I have a collection of racist jokes culled from my travels, which I enjoy reading and sharing with others. After all, as my friend says, there’s a little racist in everyone of us.

Which leads me to wonder --- what exactly, is the root of racism?

Firstly, I think it’s borne of ignorance. Not knowing much about a particular ethnic group, aside from what we’ve read in the papers and heard from our friends, we often draw our own skewed conclusions from such limited stores of information. We listen to stereotypes. We believe in blanket classifications of different races. Those guys are bad drivers; this group treat their women like furniture; those people are mostly involved in drug-dealing and other criminal activities. In reality, bad drivers, sexist men, drug dealers, and criminals can be found in every racial grouping.

Secondly, it’s the economy. Take the Philippines, for instance. Due to lack of economic opportunities at home, Filipinos leave the country in droves to seek their fortune elsewhere. Women work as nurses, hotel staff and domestics abroad. In Canada, the Live-in Caregiver Program has brought in thousands of our women to work as domestics and caregivers. A Canadian man admitted once that whenever he saw a gaggle of Filipino women in the bus on weekends, he used to assume they were nannies on a day-off.

And finally, it’s a by-product of colonization. The bitter irony in this type of racism is that a sense of superiority stays with certain members of the colonized long after the colonizers have left. I’ve felt it. I’ve fought against it in my own country. There’s another name for it: colonial mentality. It comes from being born in a place where one is expected to take pride in having some conqueror’s blood running in one’s veins, of being considered prettier than the indigenous because one has a fairer skin or a more western nose. Sad but true.

These days, I’ve stopped reacting violently to whiffs of racism. I try to live by example. Pessimists say there’s no cure for racism, but I’m thinking if I could help open one person’s mind every now and then, that’s good enough for me.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, Oct 15, 2010 issue)