Domestics: For Children of Filipino Transnational Families, Classification as Control

December 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Geraldine Pratt’s recent work with Filipina domestic workers in Canada examines the narratives of ambitious mothers who travel overseas to take care of others’ children in order to provide for their own. Once their children are able to reunite with them in Canada, mothers cite issues of deskilling, where they “lose their skills during the years that they work as caregivers,” limiting them to caretaking jobs and unable to further develop their human capital. Furthermore, Pratt reports that these mothers usually spend an average of eight to twelve years engaged in domestic work overseas and separated from their families before reunification.

As a former educator, I taught in a rural high school in Hawaii, where we had a high Filipino student population whose parents and/or grandparents were immigrants. Many of my students’ family members had limited English speaking ability. When calling home, older sibling often translated my messages for me. We also saw low attendance for parent-teacher conferences. However, when mothers did attend these conferences, they shared their frustrations at being unable to help their children with schoolwork, emphasizing their hopes that their hard work would enable their children to gain “a better life.”

My experience with immigrant Filipino families as an educator prompted me to investigate the education for Filipino American students from transnational families. However, I must stress that Filipino students were also among my best students. It is important to remember that stereotyping all Filipino students according to ethnicity is more dangerous than excluding these narratives. We must look at all contributing factors, such as family education and class in host country, discrimination, and generation.

Despite popular depictions of Filipino migrants as working in highly skilled professions, the US continues to recruit domestic and home care workers. Among Filipino domestic and home care workers: 80% are women, the median age is 44, 60% hold US citizenship, the median annual income was $17,050 in 2005, 1/3 have at least a college-level degree and another 30% attended college without completion, and 3% have graduate and post-BA level degrees. Filipino women are disproportionately represented among domestic workers, and, contrary to prevailing views of Filipinos in the US, a majority of Filipino domestic workers are neither highly educated nor have much opportunity to leave domestic work to enter other skilled professions. The median annual income is just below the federal poverty line. With only 60% of domestic workers reporting citizenship status, some Filipino domestic workers lack access to most social services.

I wrote to Geraldine Pratt on the topic of classifying Filipinos and the use of “Asian/Pacific Islander.” Pratt responded:

“I think in Canada there is a tendency not to lump Filipino youths with other Asian-Canadian youths, because the migration of Filipinos to Canada has been so particular.”

For example, consider how the Canadian and the US census approach the question of race and ethnicity. The Canadian census uses an open-ended question, along with examples and guidelines, which requires respondents to write in their race/ethnicity. The US census requires respondents to check off one or more race/ethnicity box (where Filipinos would fall under “Asian”) and allows respondents to specify their subgroup. Since respondents are not required to specify their subgroup, the US Census Bureau is continuously working on better ways to track race/ethnicity. At the same time, Canadian research tends to give more attention to Filipino academic achievement while research focused on Filipino Americans generally still include Filipino Americans in the pan-ethnic group of “Asians.”

As Michel Foucault suggested, the classification of individuals drives governmental strategies of control. By inventing all-encompassing pan-ethnic terms, which represent group otherness rather than group needs, the counting of certain “kinds of people” informs state allocation of resources and penalties. The state’s power to name a people translates into a power over people’s daily lives. When I report my ethnicity, which box(es) am I allowed to check off, how is it packaged and interpreted in study results, and later, how does someone else’s interpretation of my identity continue to mold my everyday identity and life chances, and consequently, manipulate my identity further through defining my race/ethnicity?

In Pratt’s study, Filipino domestic workers are “sacrificed for the vitality of the Canadian population”, and Canadian families “prosper” while Filipino domestic workers labor and live under conditions “unacceptable to national citizens.” Following Foucault’s critique of the state, state racism and discrimination against certain “inferiorized races” serves a “murderous function” in order to regenerate the general population. In this way, the state “saves” by denying care to domestic workers and their families, but the state also “gains” when domestic workers provide privatized services, such as health care and child care, which the state normally provides its citizens. The state denies transnational domestic workers’ full citizenship rights in order to sustain citizenship rights for others without actually investing in those services.

Though there are issues with the education system and its reinforcement of capitalist ideals and hierarchies of power, a lack of support for Filipino students from transnational families could prove to be more detrimental. When we assume that all Filipino or all Asian students are successful and fail to recognize specific needs, we allow false assumptions to further deny students their rights. For Filipino children of transnational families, lower academic performance and higher dropout rates perpetuate their place among low-waged workers. Filipino Canadian youth struggle to exceed their parents’ educational levels and work almost exclusively in certain service professions. More academic support and guidance can help Filipino American youth from transnational backgrounds overcome these statistics and use education as a tool to achieve the social mobility which originally prompted their parents to become transnational domestic workers.

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La République et la jupe

July 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Les français se pensent-ils libérés avec ce nouveau couple présidentiel hors des institutions du mariage?  La république permissive a pourtant une vue particulière sur les tenues vestimentaires des résidentes de ce pays. Nous avons tous suivi les débats sur le foulard, le hijab, puis le jilbab, mais qu’en est il de la jupe ? Autrefois seule tenue autorisée dans les lieux d’études, elle est devenue taboue.

Lors de la journée de la femme, le 8 mars dernier, le scandale est apparu dans un collège d’une petite bourgade de l’Ain. Le magazine Marianne a même été saisi de l’affaire. Les faits : une trentaine de filles décident d’enfiler une jupe pour, comme elles dirent : « honorer la féminité ».  Le film la journée de la jupe avec Isabelle Adjani avait été leur inspiration. Puis, dès leur arrivée au collège, elles ont été remarquées par des professeurs et par voie de conséquence par le principal adjoint présent au collège ce jour-là. Aussitôt les gamines sont les cibles de quelques insultes : « journée de la jupe, journée de la pute » et surtout la cible des autorités. Elles doivent être mises à l’écart, car elles ont enfreint la loi, mais quelle loi ? Car comme l’affirme le principal, la jupe n’est pas interdite au collège. De même, ce collège est loin des banlieues des grandes villes où, comme le dit la journaliste de Marianne, Marie Huret: « la jupe est réputée échauffer les hormones », ce qui peut être interprété comme une bonne raison pour se couvrir des pieds a la tête si la jeune fille ne veut pas d’ennuis. En effet, comme l’avait signalé Simone de Beauvoir, les filles grandissent dans une autorité virile qui décide, entre autres, de leur apparence acceptable pour la république comme pour la religion, c’est à dire pour l’autorité patriarcale. Il faudra donc qu’elles se soumettent.

Revenons à notre affaire de jupes, après cette journée fatale, il y a eu réunion entre les parents et le principal de l’établissement. Celui-ci n’a pas voulu revenir sur les décisions prises ce jour là. Quand les parents ont demandé des excuses, il n’en était pas question, car il ne faut pas remettre en cause l’autorité.  En cause, un nouveau pouvoir ou bien devrait-on parler du pouvoir qui s’inscrit dans la biopolitique décrite par Michel Foucault qui ne demande pas seulement une domination hiérarchisée, centralisée, et fondée sur la discipline, mais une abnégation et une acceptation au plus profond de soi qui mimique la liberté du choix. Michel Foucault avait omis de rapporter cette description, fort juste par ailleurs, au control du corps de la femme.

Heureusement, les jeunes filles ont trouvé soutien parmi les enseignants, car leur seule demande de reconnaissance et de droit n’aurait pas suffit. L’un d’entre eux explique à la journaliste de Marianne que « cette affaire doit nous permettre d’ouvrir une réflexion collective. Pour l’heure, la priorité c’est de remettre les enfants au travail. » Voilà qui est dit, revenons aux bonnes valeurs, de travail, et pourquoi pas de servitude et celle ci se doit volontaire comme le décrivait déjà La Boétie dans son ouvrage rédigé en 1549.

Effectivement il y a du chemin a faire ou a refaire, car malgré les efforts  comme la parité gouvernementale pour montrer que la condition des femmes est prise en compte, les actes qui touchent de la vie quotidienne des filles, jeunes filles et femmes leur rappellent qu’elles sont a la merci de l’autorité masculine.

 

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The incarceration of a Black woman is ….”fun?”

March 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

 

Kemba Smith

We should listen to formerly incarcerated women when it comes to prison issues. After all, women, particularly Black women, are the fastest growing prison population in America.

For example, the recently held 2012 UCLA Law Symposium, entitled “Overpoliced and Underprotected: Women, Race, and Criminalization,” brought together renowned and influential thinkers and lawyers, as well as activists from non-profit organizations. All the panelists focused on incarceration, and many advocated for the creation of a “feminist, anti-racist, prison abolition coalition.”

On the first day, only two Black female panelists identified themselves as formerly incarcerated. One was Kemba Smith. She eloquently told her story. While in college, she began dating a drug dealer. Despite never having used, handled or sold crack/cocaine, Smith was sentenced to nearly 25 years in prison.

I did not catch the name of the other woman, who was filling in for the director of the non-profit where she worked. She did not tell her story, except to say that she had served time in prison. Instead, she shared the goals of her organization, and compelled conference attendees to help break the cycle of incarceration, with more urgency and less flair than Smith.

At the end of the night, I overheard a symposium attendee tell the second woman, “Your talk was really fun!” Weeks later, I’m still curious what about incarceration is “fun.”

I wish I had asked the attendee what she meant by her comment. I would guess that she was well-intentioned. Nevertheless, I wondered what it meant to call a presentation at an academic symposium “fun.” Did it serve as a compliment? Or, as it seemed to me, did it strip this woman’s narrative of legitimacy? Such a comment was not directed at Kemba Smith, the lighter-skinned Black woman who had straightened hair, and wore a suit. No, this comment was for the darker-skinned, “poorly-dressed” woman with thick braids.

How do our own perceptions of people inform our understanding of what they are qualified to say, and why we should (or shouldn’t) listen?

This conference repeatedly referenced Michel Foucault’s notions of power and surveillance, highlighted the historical legacy of slavery, reminded us of color politics and “the paper bag test,” and challenged the stereotypes that have shaped American laws and social policy. Still, we needed to revisit the basics of feminist standpoint theory and “relations between the production of knowledge and practices of power.” Standpoint theory emerged as a “way of empowering oppressed groups,” and “valuing their experiences”, but the second speaker’s experience and voice were not honored. By suggesting that this panelist’s talk was “fun,” one conference attendee discredited the panelist’s voice, merely reproducing the structures that confine and silence certain women.

Everywhere, we should welcome the voices of all women. When working towards a feminist, anti-racist, prison abolition coalition, we should especially try to include all formerly incarcerated Black women. Unfortunately, we don’t.

(Photo Credit: LA Progressive)

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W/Health: Constructions of delusional perceptions

February 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The recent release of Deadly Spin by Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications for CIGNA, has triggered media interest in trying to explain why there is no sound universal health care system in the United States nor does one appear on the horizon.

In fact, this book could be re-titled “The Confessions of a Public Relations Hit-man.” Potter was, as he writes, a “spinmeister” for the health insurance industry, in particular Humana and CIGNA.

He reveals some of the methods that are commonly used by corporations to “create perceptions without any public disclosure of who is doing the persuading or for what purposes.” He discloses the fundamental tools of the spin-business utilized by industries (health insurance, oil, tobacco, etc.) to manipulate so-called “public opinion” with faulty information, statistics and worse. Words and phrases like “propaganda”, “fear mongering tactics”, and “consumer” appear regularly. This spin-business has found support and sustenance in the absence of political examination of the current US society.  Potter is critical of the process but rarely, if ever, critical of the neoliberal thinking that vindicates it. In The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978 – 1979, Michel Foucault argued “liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking.” Potter’s book confirms this critique of `liberalism in America.”

In my attempts to summarize what Deadly Spin exposes, I realized that what it does not expose is equally important. Potter exposes in great detail the technique and the technology of crafting messages made to diminish actual stories of mistreated people to a mere discussion of their economic viability. He also exposes the collusion between corporate power and political power in the United States, showing how corporations get involved in writing bills aimed at controlling their own power.

Potter exposes PR groups, such as APCO, that specialize in “influencing decision-makers and shaping public opinion by crafting compelling messages and recruiting effective allies”. For instance, Michael Moore produced a truthful documentary, Sicko, on the suffering of American citizens who were denied financial coverage of their medical needs. Moore focused on American citizens who had health insurance and how they were vulnerable to the health market emphasizing that access to care was a financial privilege. APCO worked strenously with Potter’s PR team to produce propaganda against Sicko and succeeded in reducing the impact of the film.

A turning point in Potter’s professional life occurred when he came across a RAM (Remote Area Medical) clinic and saw with his own eyes the ways in which people seek care were packed and packaged. Tellingly, the clinic was installed in animal stalls. Nothing prepared him for what he saw.

What the book does not reveal is the link between neoliberal dogma as religion and the reduction of people to consumers of health care. What if Potter had the same revelation in Philadelphia, where he lives, where there is massive poverty, where life expectancy, in some areas and especially in African American communities, is lower than in Bangladesh? What if Potter hadn’t had to travel to the distant rural zones to see the health care situation?

Potter reviews the history of health care reform without revealing the profound effect of racial and social discriminations. His framework remains free enterprise, service, such as there is, remains service to the consumer. He fails to reveal that the neoliberal Public Relations industry has also worked in the worldwide promotion of the same market based health care. Cigna was among the health insurance companies that invested in countries where Structural Adjustment Programs imposed the destruction of public social services, including health care. CIGNA was one of the health insurance companies that grossly benefitted from those deregulations.

Potter also does not address reproductive health and rights, except to note that women’s policies cost more because of pregnancies. In this, he mirrors the decision of the Obama administration to bargain away coverage for abortion and reproductive health as well as immigrants’ health in the passing of an ill conceived and inadequate health care plan.

Nonetheless I appreciate and respect his personal and emotional inquiry. He is right when he says that journalism has become corporately infused. Corporate, and I would add nationalist as well. He gives many examples of PR constructions and distortions of realities meant to keep people in the dark with regard to their health care system, “selling the illusion of coverage,” constructions and distortions that were never denounced or investigated properly by journalists. Those distortions have formed the faith in the power of the neoliberal economy. In the United States, opposition to that faith is subtly silenced. Wendell Potter comes short of acknowledging this relationship. Instead he remains focused on the manipulation of news media, maybe because he started his career in journalism and has now returned to it as a senior fellow on health care at the Center for Media and Democracy.

 

(Photo Credit: PR Watch)

 

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