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Part of my writing classes always entails teaching
how to distinguish prejudice coming from writers and from the
characters of the story. It should be clear to authors where the
bias is coming from—which should be from the characters, not from
themselves.
But to quote Shakespeare: aye,
there’s the rub.
It’s hard to remove prejudice
in the Filipino language. We have different types of prejudice
masked as age-old terms handed down in our society from generation
to generation. However, that shouldn’t prevent us from correcting
the negativity encoded in our words and phrases.
For instance, our racism is
enveloped in terms we use to call other races. I bet you know the
colloquial terms most Filipinos use to refer to people from India,
African Americans, and the Chinese. No matter how colloquial terms
like bumbay, egoy and intsik are, they are racist, and we should
refrain from using them. Yes, even if our parents and grandparents
still use them, it doesn’t excuse us from correcting such
stereotypical notions.
Similarly, terms that sound
sexist may not sound as such at first, but a closer look reveals a
derogatory connotation. Even seemingly harmless situations and
self-identifications, such as being feminist (man-hater) or seeing a
female motorist (her gender automatically tags her as a bad driver)
could appear as sexist, and rude. Even our local cussword spat out
by practically everybody here and there has a sexist connotation.
Why do we swear by taking our enemy’s mother in vain, not their
father?
People tend not to take these
criticisms seriously. They might even dismiss it as something
that’s a part of society already. The terms are here to stay. So
why change them? I highly disagree.
The reason why we go to school is
to educate ourselves about things we don’t know and to get
re-educated about the things we already thought we know. If there
was no move centuries ago to change age-old ways of thinking and
seeing things, we may still believe that the sun revolves around the
earth, and that our planet is flat.
I’m not saying that teachers
have a higher moral ascendancy when it comes to teaching children.
Parents should also be more flexible when it comes to education.
They should also be aware if, again, they are handing over prejudice
and negativity down to their children via the language we use. It
shouldn’t be a battle of parents/home vs. teachers/school. Parents
and teachers are always on the same side when it comes to educating
children, especially about language and tradition, but parents
sometimes need to re-evaluate how they teach certain things to their
children, and learn to get on with the changing times.
It’s not about being
politically correct in word usage; it’s about being respectful and
understanding—not just merely being tolerant—of other people’s
differences, especially people different from the norm or who
deviate from the status quo.
Comments? Suggestions? E-mail libay.scribevibe@gmail.com.
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