Filipino-Americans, Whiteness and White Privilege.

Continuing on my previous post, it’s been pretty hard growing up Filipino/Hawaiian/American. (For the most part, I mean no offense to the Hawaiian ethnicity nor my Hawaiian background, but I’ll focus mainly on being a Filipino-American.)


Reading Yen Le Espiritu’s Home Bound, I found it amazing to have so much to relate to, and to know that so many people experienced nearly the same things as I did or am doing. I feel that the book is essential to every Filipino-American. It focuses on their various lives across cultures, communities and countries, containing short interviews of Filipino-Americans and Filipinos, giving them a voice to be heard when they have been subjected to the concepts of whiteness and white privilege in the American culture.

In the eyes of a Filipino-American, the concepts of whiteness and white privilege are blurry as the memories they seek to forget after so much oppression, racism and subjugation. Filipino-Americans seek acceptance and will go through any means to obtain it. Living in America, Filipino-Americans were socially unaccepted, being racially different from the Caucasian-Americans.

In Espiritu’s Home Bound, Espiritu describes that to overcome these bounds, Filipino-Americans attempted to become like the average American teenagers, who spoke only English, dated and associated primarily with the whites and to snub their native Filipino culture (Espirit