A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists. Join Host Miko Lee as she introduces Dr. Robynn Rodriquez’s show “Spitting Fire.” Dr. Robynn speaks about Filipinx and colorism with Dr. Joanne Rondilla. LINKS Dr. Robynn, The People’s Professor SHOW TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Opening: Apex Express Asian Pacific expression. Community and cultural coverage, music and calendar, new visions and voices, coming to you with an Asian Pacific Islander point of view. It’s time to get on board the Apex Express. [00:00:35] Miko Lee: Welcome to Apex Express. I’m your host, Miko Lee, and tonight we get to hear the podcast from Dr. Robin Rodriguez called Spitting Fire, and I’m so excited for you to listen to it. Check it out, and if you wanna hear more, we’re gonna link in the show notes an earlier interview I did with Dr. Robin Rodriguez. So please listen to Spitting Fire with Dr. Robin [00:01:01] Dr. Robyn Rodriguez: I can’t actually remember a specific episode when my parents or my Lola, who helped raise me, explicitly said, “Don’t stay out in the sun.” But I always knew growing up that staying out in the sun was something I shouldn’t do because being dark was something to be avoided. I remember being embarrassed by my mom who would bust out an umbrella on a bright and shiny day. “Mom, it’s not even raining outside,” I remember complaining. I hated the big hats she would wear or insist I wear, or the comments of, “You’re getting darker,” also in a disapproving tone. I remember, too, the high praises anyone with lighter skin was heaped, even when I didn’t think they were that particularly attractive. Or how if my relatives knew someone was going to be marrying an American, basically a white person, they would exclaim, “Oh, they’re going to have beautiful children.” When I brought home a hapa, a dude who was Filipino and white, I was told that if we got married, I would be improving the race. I’ve always known, whether I can remember being told, “Don’t stay out in the sun,” that if there was a skin hue to aspire to, it was to be light. [00:02:49] To be called mestiza was to receive one of the best compliments. To be a mestiza is always already to be beautiful. Of course, if anyone said I was mestiza, it was always qualified as mestizang morena. That is, someone who exhibits certain types of physical traits that are associated with a mestiza, like having a more pointed nose or being slightly taller than the average Pinay, but not the lighter skin of a genuine mestiza. So that’s why I was sometimes called mestizang morena. Still meant as a compliment. After all, I could still enjoy the privilege of being associated with mestizaje, but only partially So many Filipinas in the diaspora, especially those of us who live in white settler colonial societies like what we now know as the United States as well as Canada, so many of us share experiences similar to the ones I’ve experienced. [00:03:58] My dear friend and colleague, a fellow sociologist, Dr. Connolly De Leon, who currently teaches at Ryerson University in Canada, made this shared experience a topic of study in her book chapter, “Mas Maputi Ako Sa’yo,” I’m Lighter Than You: The Spatial Politics of Intraracial Colorism Among Filipina-Filipino Youth in the Greater Toronto Area. It was a chapter that was part of the very historic anthology, Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility, edited by Roland Coloma, Bonnie McElvaney, Ellen Ethel Dongohan, John Paul Katungol, and Lisa M. Davidson, and it was published in 2012. Now, I’ve taught, uh, Dr. De Leon’s chapter, Connolly’s chapter, in my Filipino American experience courses in the past, and it’s always, always deeply resonated with my Filipina students. In Dr. De Leon’s chapter, she starts off with a quote that so many of us are familiar with in some way. She writes, quote, “You’re so dark. Yuck.’ My cousin would say to me in disgust as she would place her forearm beside mine to compare her light skin to my dark skin.” End quote. Dr. De Leon continues, quote, “As early as the age of four, as early as the age of four, I was taught to feel ashamed of my complexion. I did not understand what was so shameful about being the particular shade of brown that I was.” End quote. The shaming that Dr. De Leon and so many of us experience comes from colorism, which scholars define as the discriminatory treatment of individuals falling within the same racial group on the basis of skin color. [00:06:01] On this episode of Spitting Fire, Dr.- Doctora Robyn Speaks, you’ll actually hear less from me and more from yet another friend and colleague, Dr. Joanne Rondilia, who I recently hosted as part of a lecture series jointly sponsored by the Bolosan Center for Filipinx Studies, of which I serve as the founding faculty director, and the School for Liberating Education, my platform for offering Filipinx or Filipinos and ethnic studies courses that are often only available to those who happen to be able to get accepted into the four-year, often elite institutions where they are taught. It’s where I get to teach all of these amazing courses that I think all of us should have to the broader community. Dr. Rondilia has researched on colorism in the Philippines and the diaspora for over a decade. It was a topic of her 2012 dissertation, which was entitled Colonial Faces: Beauty and Skin Color Hierarchy in the Philippines and the United States. In her 2007 book, co-edited with Paul Spickard, entitled Is Lighter Better? Skin Tone Discrimination Among Asian Americans, she explores colorism as a phenomenon that no- not only plagues Filipinos, but Asian Americans actually more broadly. So now I’m gonna turn to Dr. Rondilia and her lecture entitled Don’t Stay Out in the Sun: Understanding Filipinx and Colorism. Go ahead, Joanne. Take it away. So happy you’re here. [00:07:44] Dr. Joanne Rondilla: All right. Thank you so much, Robyn. It’s, uh… Do you mind if I call you Robyn? Shall I call you Dr. Robyn? [00:07:50] Dr. Robyn Rodriguez: Oh my God. You only know me as Robyn. Okay. [00:07:56] Dr. Joanne Rondilla: I will call you Robyn, but everybody else, you, you are required to call her Dr. Robyn- … Queen Robyn. You know, that’s, that’s how. But it’s, it’s such a, a joy to be here. Um, you know, before we opened the doors, uh, Robyn and I were talking about, um, you know, what it is to be an academic and the type of language and, and spaces in which we share our research. And I think one of the things that’s really hard, especially for the soul of a lot of, uh, academics, is that we… it’s so rare for us to really share our research, uh, with the community, right? ‘Cause I don’t think of myself as a researcher. I think of myself more as a, a storyteller Right? And I think that that’s really, uh, when students- when I have students who refuse to, like, engage in research, I try to remind them, like, research is not… I don’t think of research as, uh, sort of like the white person’s, uh, uh, game. I think of research as something that is connected to us, um, and it’s our birthright. It’s our ancestral birthright, right? Because storytelling is our ancestral birthright, and that’s the lens in which I come into, uh, to exploring this issue of colorism. [00:09:15] So show of hands, for those of you in the room, I’m curious to know how many of you were told, uh, were, were told this: “Don’t stay out in the sun or you’re- or, or else you’ll get too dark.” How many of you were raised with that sort of mantra? Yes. Right. I, I almost feel like these words, uh, are so quintessential to the Filipino experience or the Filipinx experience. Like, “Don’t stay out in the sun or else you’ll get too dark.” And I’m someone who, I was born and raised on Guam, um, and so everybody on Guam is dark because we are always out in the sun, right? And my mother is very light-skinned. Uh, she came from a middle-class family from San Pablo City in the Philippines. My father’s from Lucena, and he ca- he grew up poor, uh, and rai- was raised by a single mother. And so m- there was this definite class difference between my parents, uh, but there’s also a, a skin tone difference between my parents. Like, my dad was someone who was very, very kuripot. He was very cheap, but he had this great love for my mother. Um, you know, and I think part of that was he saw her as like, you know, this, this wonderful, like, prize almost, you know. Because she came from a well-to-do family, and, you know, when they got married, her family did not want them to get married because, uh, he was not wealthy. But he was someone who, because he works on Guam as an engineer for the government of Guam, uh, and, and the US military, like that sort of… and, and he had, uh, I think in total like 13 deeds to his name. That’s sort of what eased my, my mother’s family into, you know, being supportive of their marriage. But there was… And, and on my mother’s side of the family, this is a family, and mind you, I love them very much, but this is a family that, um, values beauty a lot, right? My mom and my aunties were all some form of provincial, uh, beauty queen And so this is why me and my brother and my sister were always told, “Don’t stay out in the sun or you’ll get too dark.” Because the idea was you had to preserve whatever, whatever it was our mother gave us, right? Even though, um, you know, like, uh, you know, even though, like, members of her family say didn’t, didn’t necessarily find us attractive , you know, the idea was, like, you know, as children of this, this woman or as chil- as, as, you know, members of this particular family, you
