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I don’t know which is more exhausting: telling Filipinos in the Philippines that we’re not Malay or telling Filipinos in the U.S. that we’re not Pacific Islanders?
In any case, both assumptions are rooted in outdated racial categories from the colonial period. Thread below!
In any case, both assumptions are rooted in outdated racial categories from the colonial period. Thread below!
To be absolutely clear: both ‘Malay’ and ‘Pacific Islander’ are legit names for very distinct ethnic groups, but have been historically used as “racial” categories by Western colonisers between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We should know better in 2020. https://twitter.com/wikanghimagsik/status/1283091031227953152
https://twitter.com/wikanghimagsik/status/1283091031227953152
It’s easy to mistake ‘Pacific Islander’ (Pasifika) as a generic catch-all label for people who live on islands in the Pacific, but that’s not what it means as an historical and cultural label. A Pacific Islander is a native of the Pacific Islands. Pasifika Twitter can verify.
The Pacific Islands (capital “I”) are not just any group of islands in the Pacific: these islands are inhabited by people who share a common recent history and culture. These are the Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians. Filipinos are not native to these islands.
Is the Philippines an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean? Yes. As is Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, etc. The largest island in the Pacific is New Guinea, followed by Honshu and Sulawesi. Vancouver Island is Canada’s largest island in the Pacific. It’s a fucking huge ocean, man.
Now, Asia is an even broader category, not just because of the sheer size of the continent (the largest and most populous on earth) but also because of the multitude of languages, cultures, and histories that are native there. Is the Philippines in Asia? Yes.
Culturally, Filipinos are closely related to other ‘Asian’ peoples like Malays, Javanese, Buginese, Sundanese, Balinese, Taiwanese Aborigines, and the list of -ese goes on. It’s not just our languages; it’s also our food, our music, our dances, and our pre-colonial religions.
A closer look at our genetic markers also points to a mostly (Southeast) Asian cluster, meaning our ancestors were in Asia for thousands of years. Some Pacific Islanders, as descendants of the original Austronesians from Taiwan, also have this genetic marker.
The migration of these first Asian sea-farers from Taiwan to the rest of the world (called the Austronesian Expansion) is documented in our material culture, language, and DNA. Haplogroup O1 (Y-DNA)a-M119 is found in almost all Austronesian-speaking populations.
Yes, Filipinos and Pacific Islanders do share a common ancient history, both being Austronesian-speaking peoples, but we are no more Islander than they are Asian. Malagasy, spoken on Madagascar off the coast of East Africa, is also Austronesian. It’s a big, big, BIG family.
There is no Asian or Austronesian unity, not even a Filipino or Polynesian unity. We’re different peoples with different cultures and histories that happen to share a common origin—which is true for almost every other ethnolinguistic family there is. Ask the Indo-Europeans.
We can celebrate our shared ancestry—a complex one—without indulging in fetishising fantasies of an all-encompassing island culture that doesn’t exist. Some of us are islanders, for sure, but some are also mountain peoples, riverside-dwellers, coastal peoples, and so on.
We can be proud of our shared Austronesian heritage by working together, respecting boundaries, and not appropriating other identities. What we’re not going to do is to link tattooing and brown skin to “Austronesian-ness” like a 19th century coloniser.
Racialising our Austronesian heritage is counterproductive to understanding and celebrating the diversity of our cultures and histories. Itneg people are not Amis, Kapampangan are not Māori, Orang Melayu are not Kānaka Maoli, Agta are not Fijian, and so on.
Just to go back to the first tweet, what I’m trying to say is in all this is for y’all to STOP spreading misinformation, crackpot racial theories, and anti-Asian rhetoric to promote your fake “Islander Pride”. It’s not helping.
Lastly, it isn’t a coincidence that the majority of Filipinos (or people of Filipino descent) who insist on identifying as “Pacific Islander” are American. No one else to blame but the U.S. Colonial Empire’s racialised views of the diverse peoples they conquered.
