dew drops

This is me, my views and my life.
My story is not mine, so is the plot.
But come with me and take the plunge,
Swim in the ocean of life.
Make some ripples throughout eternity
And praise Him again and again for this wonderful opportunity!

Monday, October 08, 2007

FILIPINO RACE! NOT MALAY!!!!

got this from another blog, and i do find it interesting!


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The Filipino Race
Posted by ricardo on Jun 19, '06 11:58 AM for everyone

We've always been taught in school that Filipinos are of the Malay race. So imagine my surprise when a form that I filled up while being keyed into the database of a hospital here, I was told that I am not Malay, and that my race is Filipino. I pointed out that Filipino is my nationality, but my race is Malay. As much as she wants to listen and try to understand (I assumed) what I am trying to say, their computer system won't let give her much of a choice anyway.

That was when I filled up the birth cert of my 1st born. And it happened over and over until I learned to put in just what they want and not what I always knew. Now, this issue on race came up again in the yahoogroups for IT profs here. Why is it that people here (even the gov't officially) cannot accept that Filipinos are of the Malay stock?

Wikipedia was not up then yet, or maybe was still in its infancy. So that I have a chance now, I found a relevant entry there. One of the paragraph there in fact noted the "miseducation" of Filipinos regarding their being "Malay":

"...in the Philippines, many Filipinos consider the term "Malay" to refer to the indigenous population of the country as well as the population of neighboring countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. This misconception is due in part to American anthropologists H. Otley Beyer who proposed that the Filipinos were actually Malays who migrated from Malaysia and Indonesia. This idea was in turn propagated by Filipino historians and is still taught in schools. However, the prevalent consensus among contemporary anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists actually proposes the reverse; namely that the Malays of Malaysia and Indonesia originally migrated south from the Philippines during the prehistoric period. Among these are scholars in the field of Austronesian studies such as Peter Bellwood, Robert Blust, Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley, and Lawrence Reid."

So I guess, if we are wrong to think that people from the peninsular Malaysia walked over to Philippines via land bridges, then at the same time the Malaysians and Indonesians are all wrong for thinking there's a Malay race. If the movement of aboriginal people were actually in reverse based on contemporary anthropological beliefs and assumed linguistic evolution (because we are actually more related to the polynesians in the Pacific), then could it be that Malaysians and Indonesians are actually of Filipino race instead? Hehe. Of course, its not so simple as that. But that article did open my eyes.

But the thing is that, there could be no Malay race at all. Because the word is actually used more for group people living in the Malaysian archipelago, based more on a cultural common denominator. As the article said, "the term is used as a form of ethnic self-identification." And to most people, race is simply about skin color. I mean, some fair skinned guy can go to a tanning salon and come out a Malay for a day, right?

As I posted in that yahoogroup, the race in official forms to be filled up here are more from a political standpoint. From the minimum stuff I gather on local history here, they went through a phase of violent conflict between races. Policies since then have to take into consideration the races of citizens, so I guess it manifests itself through the race tick boxes in the forms. In the end, they are more relevant to locals, and other citizens who's countries are closely intertwined with Singapore, like Malaysia.

I never really thought about the "Filipino race" even if I have been filling it up on forms for the past 4 years since I turned SPR. But now that its brought up front, I think I'm quite liking it It seems even better that Filipinos are on a race of our own.