Benevolent Assimilation and Paternalistic Racism

On the seventh day of Filipino American History Month, it is a pleasure to share the following Filipino American history.

As early as December 21, 1898, President William McKinley set the tone for how the government of the United States of America viewed the Philippines and its people. On that day, he proclaimed:

…it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. In the fulfillment of this high mission, supporting the temperate administration of affairs for the greatest good of the governed, there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority, to repress disturbance and to overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of the United States.

While the government of the United States of America declared the Philippine-American War over by 1902, guerilla resistance movements against the American occupation continued until 1913.

"Little Brown Brother" was a term used by Americans to refer to Filipinos. The term was coined by William Howard Taft, the first American Governor-General of the Philippines (1901-1904) and later the 27th President of the United States. The term was not originally intended to be derogatory, nor an ethnic slur.

Taft told President McKinley that "our little brown brothers" would need "fifty or one hundred years" (note that the Philippines became independent of the United States of America in 1946, about 50 years after the Philippines was ceded by Spain) of close supervision "to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills. Fillipinos (sic) are moved by similar considerations to those which move other men." The phrase "Little Brown Brother" drew some sneers from both Americans and Filipinos, however, due to the bloodshed of the Philippine-American War.

During this same time period, Rudyard Kipling published a poem in 1899, entitled “The White Man’s Burden.” The subtitle was “The United States and the Philippine Islands.” The term is often interpreted to mean that White people have an obligation to rule over and encourage the cultural development of people from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds until they can take their place in the world by fully adopting Western ways.

These concepts were all aligned with the ideology of manifest destiny, that the United States was destined, even divinely ordained, to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean and beyond. Altogether, in the words of historian Creighton Miller, they were a reflection of "paternalist racism," which has arguably echoed into the present-day.

Happy Filipino American History Month!