‘Brown skin, yellow masks’ (apologies to Franz Fanon’s ‘black skin, white masks’)

BY ANTONIO P. CONTRERAS      NOVEMBER 29, 2018

IF President Duterte is only playing games with China, appearing to be obsequious as a strategy to disarm and put up a pliant façade, but eventually will spring a surprise, armed with the arbitral tribunal ruling, he has to devise a mechanism to tell his political base what he is up to without showing his hand – truly a challenge in itself. This is simply because the images he evokes, from joking about the Philippines being a province of China, to his audacious admission that China is already in possession of the West Philippine Sea, are leading his followers to acquire a consciousness that has located China at the center of their political imaginations.

Unquestioning loyalty appears to pervade a substantial majority of the political base of the President, particularly those who inhabit social media. This has turned many ordinary people, and even those who should know better, into China apologists even to the point of attacking anyone who questions its agenda.

If the President plans to spring a surprise, which he hinted when he said that he will just put aside the arbitral tribunal ruling for now, and will use it at the right time, he may just face a confused base of support with a radically pro-China neo-colonial mentality.

Franz Fanon, the Algerian post-colonial writer, referred to Africans who are possessed by a fixation towards the culture of their white colonialists as having “black skin, white masks” not as a racial slur but a self-deprecating label to lament their colonial mentality. At the rate President Duterte’s avid supporters are going, and without China firing a single shot to subdue us, we can also lament their having “brown skin, yellow masks,” with yellow referring not to the color of the political opposition, but to the racial category to which China belongs. Indeed, that would be ironic, since being referred to as yellow would definitely offend a cohort whose be-all and end-all is its feeling of dislike, if not hatred, for this color.

It is simply unnerving to watch people who wanted to wage war against Kuwait when one of our own was murdered there, and cheered as our diplomats mounted a clandestine operation to rescue Filipinos trapped in hostile working environments there, contrary to every norm of international law and diplomatic practice. Yet, these are the very same people who would prefer capitulation in the face of a formidable country, to just accept the fact that we have a weaker army, and an even weaker economy. This, even if our own fisherfolk were denied access to fish within our own exclusive economic zone (EEZ) over which we have sovereign rights under the terms of international law through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Uniclos).

It is bizarre that these people are the very first to highlight and label the arbitral tribunal ruling as an alleged defeat of the Philippines simply because Panatag Shoal was referred to as a rock and was declared as historically a common fishing ground for many countries. This single finding is used to diminish the larger victories which the Philippines had won, when the arbitral Tribunal ruled that China has no historic rights over the West Philippine Sea (WPS) and that its nine-dash line has no basis in history or in international law, and that China has violated on many occasions the sovereign rights of the Philippines. One can even interpret that while the tribunal did not rule over which country has sovereignty over Panatag, our sovereign rights over it can be inferred from the fact that the tribunal gave credence to Uniclos as a basis for making claims, thereby implying that our claim to Panatag as within our EEZ is legally more superior to China’s historic claim, which in fact was negated by the findings of the tribunal.

It is most unfortunate that the Duterte administration has practically labeled the arbitral tribunal ruling as useless because it is unenforceable, which when we come to think about it is a fundamental slap not only on our case in the WPS, but to all rulings made by international bodies. The thought of counting on the world community, many of whom would run to these international bodies to seek remedy for future conflicts to avoid war, appears to have simply never crossed the mind of the administration, and this is what is now reproduced in the minds of its most avid followers. It did not enter their minds that enforcing a ruling that is favorable to our country has a constituency that goes beyond the Philippines and China because it would turn the WPS into either international waters to which every country in the world should have open and free access, or EEZs of other countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia and Brunei.

Yet, anyone who is critical of the position taken by the President on the WPS is targeted for vilification by his political base. Acting Chief Justice Antonio Carpio, one who has a robust historical and legal knowledge of the issue, is incessantly demonized as a thorn on the side of the President, and not as an enabler of wisdom and understanding, simply because his views are fundamentally different.

It is indeed surreal to witness Filipinos turning into China apologists, celebrating surrender over critical engagement, diminishing an important victory, and slandering those who cross their paths by simply expressing a different opinion.

GMA7 journalist Jun Veneracion, for example, is now being painted as having maliciously sailed to the WPS precisely to create a documentary whose release was timed to shame President Xi Jinping. People are questioning why his encounter with the Chinese Coast Guard, which effectively prevented him from performing his job as a journalist in Panatag, which at the very least was common fishing ground, and at most was part of our EEZ, was in November 8 but was only aired on November 22 right after President Xi’s visit. The idiocy of this allegation is simply mind-boggling, considering that Veneracion went there to shoot for a weekly TV show that airs every Thursday, and not for the evening news. Aside from the fact that Veneracion could not have anticipated the actions of the Chinese Coast Guard, or directed them in a way to fit his alleged agenda, it was even more prudent that the episode should have been aired the Thursday after Xi left instead of the Thursday before his arrival which could have even been more embarrassing for both Xi and President Duterte.

But the main bottom line of Veneracion’s critics is that he should have simply practiced self-censorship, and just killed the story so as not to throw a monkey wrench on Xi’s visit. In fact, some even questioned why Veneracion was even there knowing that the Chinese were already positioned there.

The obsequiousness is simply appalling, to say the least, that one should even demand that we censor our own media so as not to offend China.

There is one thing that these brown-skinned but yellow-masked Filipinos must bear in mind. It appears they are not the majority. Whether they believe it or not, 84 percent of the Filipinos disagree with them.

https://www.manilatimes.net/brown-skin-yellow-masks-apologies-to-franz-fanons-black-skin-white-masks/475227/