By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
It’s all about the face...
...OR YOUR race or the lace (of what you’re wearing). Imagine these: a) A foreigner walks hand in hand with a Pinay. You immediately think they are in for a good time, if you know what I mean. b) A scruffy-looking guy in tattered jeans keeps eyeing your bag. You quickly put it in front of you. c) When someone’s named Cheemarlyn or Jhograd, you automatically think he or she’sbakya (tacky). We are quick to judge and stereotype. We, including this writer, who may have certain presumptions about readers who encounter this article what they immediately have in mind about the scenarios above.
In the movie, Divergent, society is divided into factions: Erudite, Candor, Amity, Abnegation, and Dauntless. But that’s fiction. In real life, there’s another faction in society that persists: the Judgmental, which, come to think of it, is all of us.
Yet, “sociologists believe that we are not born with prejudice.” So says the Web site of Sociology Guide. “Rather, we learn prejudice from the people around us.” The Web site defines prejudice as attitudes and opinions of people while discrimination refers to the “actual behavior toward another group or individual.” As long as there are factions in society, discrimination and prejudice prevail. In American activist and author Charlotte Bunch’s words, “Sexual, racial, gender violence, and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.”
For Carlo Vergara, a graphic designer and writer of the Zsazsa Zaturnnah and Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady comic books, being judgmental is embedded in the Pinoy mind-set. “I think it’s in our culture. Will it stop? I think it will be very hard to change,” he said. Mr. Vergara’s latest book-turned-musical Leading Lady tackles the issues of yayas (domestics), sosyals (bourgeois) and coños (loosely refers to a particular subset of Filipinos of Hispanic descent with a predilection for a certain expletive).
“Whether we care to admit it or not, we have little forms of discrimination, like the idea of certain skin color or when you’re not speaking in English you’re not sosyal, or if you’re attractive you get ahead. Even though we know they’re wrong, somehow we still do it. The whole idea of speaking in English alone, we are so quick to criticize other Filipinos ‘pag sumablay sila (when they commit pronunciation or grammatical errors), we turn [into] grammar Nazis. But then again, there are foreigners who don’t speak it fluently, but for us, it’s okay. We have bias even in our own fellow Filipinos,” Mr. Vergara said.
In today’s pop culture, there’s a viral slang word that every cool kid keeps using -- the “basic bitch.” Women today loosely refer to some among them as “basic” if they are, well, basic, regular women who like basic, regular things -- anything that’s the trend in pop culture or in the contemporary milieu at large, from Justin Bieber to Starbucks.
But then again, what does “regular” mean?
In Hong Kong, Filipino and Indonesian maids are banned from using “regular” elevators. And this, of course, has been the regulation locally, especially in the high-rise apartment buildings of Makati and Bonifacio Global City. The car to ride for theseyayas, drivers, and outside contractors from electricians to plumbers is the “service elevator.”
To be sure, discrimination is worldwide, universal. Last February, a photo in Pakistan went viral, showing a family dining together in a fancy restaurant while the two yayaswatched over them, and this, of course, drew outrage and debate among the netizenry.
By now, of course, we’re aware of Balesin Island Club’s controversial “yaya meal.” Operators of this resort club in an island getaway off Quezon province have since cleared this issue, saying the servants may order anything they wish. But this will not end right away the persistence of discrimination, especially among “people who don’t want their yayas to eat whatever they want,” as TV personality Maggie Wilson lamented in her Facebook post on the yaya meal.
Students and graduates too aren’t spared discrimination. A recent survey byJobstreet.com showed that employers still favor the top eight universities in the Philippines -- which in order, are the University of the Philippines, University of Sto. Tomas, De La Salle University (tied with Ateneo de Manila University), Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Mapua Institute of Technology, Far Eastern University, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (tied with Adamson University), and University of the East (tied with Philippine Normal University and Technological Institute of the Philippines). But employers also say they are open to accepting graduates from other schools as long as the candidates are “trainable and willing to be trained.”
This presumably excludes the many dropouts (some of them now National Artists) who have excelled in culture and the arts, if they were just starting out today. But in some organizations, like BBC’s broadcasting training program and Google, an applicant’s background hardly matters. In that famous interview with Huffpost, Google’s people operations head Laszlo Bock said, “We used to care about what school you went to. We really don’t anymore. We found it doesn’t predict performance. How you do on the interview questions predicts performance.”
Small (and huge) gestures indicating prejudice and discriminations happen in society, every day, every minute. We sometimes take them for granted, but then a moment of basic goodness seizes us and we become aware of the nuances in our relations as people. Comedian Ruffa Mae Quinto’s Instagram post of her “yaya meal” order in Balesin was one such moment, but it was followed by contrived speculation as to whether she ate it, which is so the pulse of social media.
Yet, “sociologists believe that we are not born with prejudice.” So says the Web site of Sociology Guide. “Rather, we learn prejudice from the people around us.” The Web site defines prejudice as attitudes and opinions of people while discrimination refers to the “actual behavior toward another group or individual.” As long as there are factions in society, discrimination and prejudice prevail. In American activist and author Charlotte Bunch’s words, “Sexual, racial, gender violence, and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.”
For Carlo Vergara, a graphic designer and writer of the Zsazsa Zaturnnah and Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady comic books, being judgmental is embedded in the Pinoy mind-set. “I think it’s in our culture. Will it stop? I think it will be very hard to change,” he said. Mr. Vergara’s latest book-turned-musical Leading Lady tackles the issues of yayas (domestics), sosyals (bourgeois) and coños (loosely refers to a particular subset of Filipinos of Hispanic descent with a predilection for a certain expletive).
“Whether we care to admit it or not, we have little forms of discrimination, like the idea of certain skin color or when you’re not speaking in English you’re not sosyal, or if you’re attractive you get ahead. Even though we know they’re wrong, somehow we still do it. The whole idea of speaking in English alone, we are so quick to criticize other Filipinos ‘pag sumablay sila (when they commit pronunciation or grammatical errors), we turn [into] grammar Nazis. But then again, there are foreigners who don’t speak it fluently, but for us, it’s okay. We have bias even in our own fellow Filipinos,” Mr. Vergara said.
In today’s pop culture, there’s a viral slang word that every cool kid keeps using -- the “basic bitch.” Women today loosely refer to some among them as “basic” if they are, well, basic, regular women who like basic, regular things -- anything that’s the trend in pop culture or in the contemporary milieu at large, from Justin Bieber to Starbucks.
But then again, what does “regular” mean?
In Hong Kong, Filipino and Indonesian maids are banned from using “regular” elevators. And this, of course, has been the regulation locally, especially in the high-rise apartment buildings of Makati and Bonifacio Global City. The car to ride for theseyayas, drivers, and outside contractors from electricians to plumbers is the “service elevator.”
To be sure, discrimination is worldwide, universal. Last February, a photo in Pakistan went viral, showing a family dining together in a fancy restaurant while the two yayaswatched over them, and this, of course, drew outrage and debate among the netizenry.
By now, of course, we’re aware of Balesin Island Club’s controversial “yaya meal.” Operators of this resort club in an island getaway off Quezon province have since cleared this issue, saying the servants may order anything they wish. But this will not end right away the persistence of discrimination, especially among “people who don’t want their yayas to eat whatever they want,” as TV personality Maggie Wilson lamented in her Facebook post on the yaya meal.
Students and graduates too aren’t spared discrimination. A recent survey byJobstreet.com showed that employers still favor the top eight universities in the Philippines -- which in order, are the University of the Philippines, University of Sto. Tomas, De La Salle University (tied with Ateneo de Manila University), Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Mapua Institute of Technology, Far Eastern University, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (tied with Adamson University), and University of the East (tied with Philippine Normal University and Technological Institute of the Philippines). But employers also say they are open to accepting graduates from other schools as long as the candidates are “trainable and willing to be trained.”
This presumably excludes the many dropouts (some of them now National Artists) who have excelled in culture and the arts, if they were just starting out today. But in some organizations, like BBC’s broadcasting training program and Google, an applicant’s background hardly matters. In that famous interview with Huffpost, Google’s people operations head Laszlo Bock said, “We used to care about what school you went to. We really don’t anymore. We found it doesn’t predict performance. How you do on the interview questions predicts performance.”
Small (and huge) gestures indicating prejudice and discriminations happen in society, every day, every minute. We sometimes take them for granted, but then a moment of basic goodness seizes us and we become aware of the nuances in our relations as people. Comedian Ruffa Mae Quinto’s Instagram post of her “yaya meal” order in Balesin was one such moment, but it was followed by contrived speculation as to whether she ate it, which is so the pulse of social media.
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