Stunning beauty queen Chelsea Manalo’s victory has reignited the thorny issue of skin color in this culturally conflicted republic of ours.
Twenty-four-year-old Manalo — she of the dazzling smile, statuesque figure, and capable intelligence — will be representing the country at the Miss Universe pageant in Mexico in September.
Manalo’s win has been justly celebrated as transformative, with scores of admiring beauty pageant fans insisting her crowning helped “shatter” biased Filipino beauty ideals.
Expectedly, however, hordes of racist philistines rained racist insults down Manalo’s regal path as they howled their displeasure and discomfort over her pronounced dark skin, courtesy of her Filipino and African heritage.
If the controversy looks like another unwarranted distraction from the country’s intractable problems, it however should be welcome.
In fact, we should consider seriously Ms. Manalo’s travails over skin color as it invariably is also about the wider conversation regarding Filipino pop and elitist cultures.
Frustratingly, however, such conversations take place in a social milieu where many are generally unaware that they prefer lighter skin tones than their natural skin color.
A general malaise which keen cultural observers say makes many Filipinos largely ignorant of “colorism” or discrimination based on skin color.
Parenthetically: Culture scholars strictly define colorism as the “process of discrimination that privileges light-skinned people of color over their-dark skinned counterparts.” Colorism, however, is only concerned with actual skin tone as opposed to racial or ethnic identity. Racism is a larger systemic, social process while colorism is only a manifestation of racism.
Such pronounced obliviousness is immediately caused by the daily bombardment of images from both local and international media celebrating white or light skin and European/North American facial features — images that in turn standardize “white” beauty as the prevailing Filipino body and beauty aesthetic.
It also doesn’t help matters any that the same “white-skin” aesthetic standards are being maintained by the beauty industry — an industry which counts the toxic skin whitening industry as a major powerhouse.
Undoubtedly, the pursuit of light skin is worth billions to the economy. It, however, has also been proven fatal to its consumers.
Medical researchers have found that the widespread use of skin-bleaching creams, particularly those containing toxic levels of mercury, causes myriad physical and mental health problems.
Maintaining a white skin as the supreme beauty standard, therefore, isn’t as innocent as it is often depicted, making the various media and social media personalities endorsing such skin lightening products direct accessories to an unacknowledged health crime.
Cultural analysts, meanwhile, often attribute the white-skin beauty ideal to the country’s Hispanic and North American colonial past. A colonial past that essentially says privileged white or near white skin means “civility, rationality, beauty and superiority,” while darker skin means “savagery, irrationality, ugliness, and inferiority.”
Despite this prevailing notion, some Filipino archaeologists have aired their view that even during our pre-colonial past “fair” skin was a distinct skin preference.
No matter the exact cause of the Filipino’s continuing dilemma about skin color, the fact remains that Filipino contemporary culture now stands at “the intersection of internalized colonial values and the cult of the new global beauty” that privileges white skin.
A pervasive contemporary social and cultural phenomenon which unfortunately has led to many Filipinos with darker skin tones to pay a steep price even as those with lighter skin color benefit.
One steep price Filipinos with darker skin personally pay concerns work. Persistent complaints abound about the biases of Filipino employers for fair-skinned employees, especially when it comes to white-collar work.
To her personal credit, Ms. Manalo by her lonesome dismantled such a workplace bias. Before her Miss Universe candidacy, she worked at the front desk of a Pampanga hotel.
In essence, therefore, Ms. Manalo’s triumph in overcoming her skin color troubles makes us recognize that the Filipino’s continuing embrace of the idea that Filipino beauty is now about a diversity of skin colors is succeeding.