The imperialism of race: class, rights and patronage in the Philippine city

Abstract

Decisions by the US Supreme Court at the end of the Spanish American War facilitated US colonial expansionism by laying the foundations for a two-tiered system of rights in the Philippines. In tandem with establishing the legal boundaries of citizenship, politicians and media extended a race-based system of governance through speeches and graphic caricatures that racialised Filipinos as underdeveloped and threatening. Both the law and a patron-client system served to create a new Filipino elite that collaborated with the colonial authorities and entrenched cultural imperialism; the racial patterning of white American/Filipino relations was then transduced into class relations among Filipinos that continue to stratify Philippine society, with the Filipino elite replacing the colonial administrators in this two-tiered system of rights. Today, this racial categorisation and organisation of people continues to appear in popular imagery; and the replacement of race by class in a rights-based bifurcation of Philippine society shapes the ways in which penal law in metropolitan Manila is practised and administered so that the poor (some 40 to 50 per cent of the population) experience a diminished, second-class form of citizenship.