Articles

“Destiny Has Thrown the Negro and

the Filipino Under the Tutelage of
America”: Race and Curriculum in the
Age of Empire curi_454 495..520

ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada

ABSTRACT
The article brings together the fields of curriculum studies, history of education,
and ethnic studies to chart a transnational history of race, empire, and curriculum.
Drawing from a larger study on the history of education in the Philippines under
U.S. rule in the early 1900s, it argues that race played a pivotal role in the discursive
construction of Filipino/as and that the schooling for African Americans in the U.S.
South served as the prevailing template for colonial pedagogy in the archipelago. It
employs Michel Foucault’s concept of archaeology to trace the racial grammar in
popular and official representations, especially in the depiction of colonized
Filipino/as as racially Black, and to illustrate its material effects on educational
policy and curriculum. The tension between academic and manual-industrial
instruction became a site of convergence for Filipino/as and African Americans,
with decided implications for the lived trajectories in stratified racialized and
colonized communities.

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folks and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

In response to the end of the Spanish-American War that resulted in the

United States occupying and governing the Philippines as its sole colony in
Asia, the poet Rudyard Kipling celebrated what he deemed as the noble
© 2009 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
Curriculum Inquiry 39:4 (2009)
Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2009.00454.x
496 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

enterprise of imperialism.1 In “The White Man’s Burden,” a widely circu-

lated poem published in 1899, Kipling (2007) called upon the colonizers to
take responsibility for the supervision and advancement of the colonized
toward modernity and civilization. He conjured the image of Filipino/as as
a wild devil-child to reflect and reinforce the prevailing discourse about the
colonized as culturally, intellectually, and physically underdeveloped and
inferior. The devil-child image further circulated in popular media, aca-
demic scholarship, and government reports, consequently crystallizing into
a powerful symbolic representation of Filipino/as in the early 1900s. As the
United States entered what historian Eric Hobsbawm (1987) calls the Age
of Empire (1875–1914), the figure of Filipino/as as primitive, atavistic
savages provided and bolstered White supremacist and paternalistic ratio-
nalities that underpinned U.S. colonial educational policy and curriculum
in the Philippines. Mass public schooling, for the colonizers, served as a
resolution to the White man’s burden, and persists as a legacy of Western
imperialism in many postcolonial nations.
In this article, I draw on my larger study on the history of education in
the Philippines under U.S. rule, and utilize the interpretive and method-
ological concept of archaeology from historian-philosopher Michel Fou-
cault (1972). Driven by archaeology’s central question of “How is it that
one particular statement appeared rather than another?” (p. 27), I
examine the development of the public school system in the Philippines “in
the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence,
fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may
be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes”
(p. 28). These statements constitute discourses “as practices that systemati-
cally form the objects of which they speak” (p. 49). The formation of
discourses is embedded in “a complex group of relations that function as a
rule” (p. 74), delineating regularities of inclusion and exclusion, of possi-
bility and foreclosure. Tracing the “conditions of existence” for the emer-
gence of public education in the Philippines enables me to suture
geographically and analytically the transnational relations between the
United States and the Philippines and to examine the discursive formation
of a racialized curriculum for colonized Filipino/as.
I will argue that race was a significant ruling grammar that regulated
both the construction of Filipino/as as colonized subjects and the transna-
tional propagation of racially conscious U.S. educational policy and cur-
riculum in the early 20th century. I will demonstrate how the depiction of
Filipino/as paralleled, relied upon, and solidified hegemonic understand-
ings of peoples of color as uncivilized and in need of White tutelage for
advancement. I will also contend that colonial education in the Philippines
was largely inflected by and patterned after the curriculum for African
Americans in the U.S. South. In other words, since Filipino/as were discur-
sively configured as “Negroes,” the schooling for African Americans
became the prevailing racial template for the colonial pedagogy of
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 497

Filipino/as. Such historical connection links the colonial and racial condi-
tions of Filipino/as and African Americans, and offers a generative empiri-
cal site for transnational and comparative analysis of race and curriculum.2
In addition, I will claim that the discursive construction of colonized
Filipino/as as racially Black had material effects. In response to critiques of
Foucault from historical materialist perspectives, cultural theorist Patrick
McHugh (1989) argues that “there is a ‘ponderous, awesome materiality’ to
discourse, an ‘incorporeal materialism’ where discourse is an event that
‘takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of materiality’ ” (p. 98). He
points out that “Foucault analyzes the power of discourse to shape the
world. Discourse produces knowledge, and regardless of whether this
knowledge is ‘true’ or ‘false’ to some material reality, it establishes privi-
leges and priorities, makes distinctions and exclusions, organizes institu-
tional practices, informs the machinations of the State, all on the order of
material reality” (ibid.). In this article, I will demonstrate that the material
effects of the discursive construction of Filipino/as manifested in educa-
tional policy and curriculum which structured what teachers taught, what
students learned, and what kinds of lived trajectories were made possible.

TOWARD A TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY OF RACE, EMPIRE, AND

CURRICULUM

The article contributes to and brings into conversation three academic

fields—curriculum studies, history of education, and ethnic studies—to
chart what I call a “transnational history of race, empire, and curriculum.”
The field of curriculum studies has been moving toward an international
perspective to expand North America’s scholarly engagement with curricu-
lum research in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, and Europe, and to
garner insights to understand and impact national educational reforms,
policies, and practices (Pinar et al., 1995). Though international in title,
the conferences and publications on the internationalization of curriculum
studies remain, in Bill Pinar’s (2003b) assessment, “very much situated
within . . . issues that preoccupy the nations in which we do our work” (p.
2). The International Handbook of Curriculum Research (Pinar, 2003a) that
delineates the state of curriculum studies in 28 countries, including the
United States and Canada, exemplifies the pervasive nation-centered
emphasis. Rather than focusing on the nation or international, I suggest
that transnational studies, those that frame research beyond the nation as
their main unit of analysis, can yield rich insights regarding the imbricated
inter-relatedness of nations and the border-crossing flows of people, ideas,
goods, cultures, and institutions.
Following a transnational line of inquiry, for instance, Janet Miller
(2005) outlines “the worldliness of American curriculum studies—that is,
the spread of these studies into multiple international arenas” (p. 11). By
locating U.S. scholarly productions and political actions in relation to their
498 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

global circulations and effects, Miller opens theoretical and empirical

spaces to interrogate how the United States is implicated in power/
knowledge relations with other countries. As “American curriculum
studies” sets its scholarly sights and sites outside of the United States, I
argue that it must grapple with the history and ongoing operation of U.S.
imperialism and education. Without the use of empire as a relevant cat-
egory of analysis, the internationalization of curriculum studies could
(re)produce a dynamic of intellectual and pedagogical imperialism and
neocolonialism between the United States and the rest of the world.
While curriculum studies scholars are increasingly paying attention to
the internationalization of their field, as a field its theoretical and empiri-
cal inquiries regarding race have been largely disconnected (Gay, 2000;
McCarthy, 1998; Pinar, 2006; Watkins, 2001; Willinsky, 1998).3 On the
other hand, the field of educational history faces a different set of foci
and priorities. While there seems to be “[d]isinterest in international
trends . . . and lack of familiarity with other educational systems [beyond
the United States]” (Mahoney, 2000, p. 18), U.S. historians of education
are calling for more research on race and ethnicity outside of the con-
ventional Black–White framework and toward more comparative inquiries
on the conditions and experiences among peoples of color. Although
more research is needed in the history of Asian American education
(Tamura, 2001), there is a small yet critical mass of scholars who are
undertaking pioneering work in Asian American educational history
(Coloma, 2004; Lim de Sánchez, 2003; Ng, Lee, & Pak, 2007; Pak, 2002;
Tamura, 1994). In “New Directions in American Educational History,”
Rubén Donato and Marvin Lazerson (2000) pointed out that there is
“almost no synthesis or intersection across the communities [of color];
much of the history has been written in isolation—with Blacks, Latinos,
Asians, Native Americans and others writing from or about only their
particular communities” (p. 8). They recommend more research that
addresses the historical convergences of various communities of color
and how they have impacted each other.4
Although I situate my work within curriculum studies and educational
history, I am also grounded in the fields of ethnic studies and Asian
American studies in particular. Central to ethnic studies inquiries is the
racial formation of those who have become categorized as peoples of color.
Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1987) define racial forma-
tion as “the process by which social, economic and political forces deter-
mine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they
are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (p. 61). The category of “Asian
American and Pacific Islander” (AAPI), for instance, is an “interpellation
and identification that name and bring together a racialized assembly of
diverse ethno-national cultural groups. In other words, the AAPI ‘race’ is
something that is both imposed upon and claimed by a group of people
based on political reasons and not on biological, genetic or anthropological
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 499

criteria” (Coloma, 2006, p. 8). As sociopolitical constructs, race and racial

meanings are constituted by circulating discourses. The racial terms that we
use and the meanings given to make sense of them are thereby embedded
within particular historical, cultural, and geographical contexts.
Scholars of Asian American studies extend the conceptualization of racial
formation to account for cross-racial, transnational, and postcolonial con-
ditions. The shared, and at times conflicting, experiences of communities of
color in the United States as well as the ways in which the conditions and
cultures of a particular racialized group have shaped and impacted those of
another are underscored in more recent cross-racial comparative projects
that link Asian Americans with African American, Latino/a, Middle Eastern,
and indigenous communities. For example, Asian Americanists have exam-
ined the multiethnic development of urban geographies, the labor condi-
tions of immigrant workers, the post–9/11 demonization of peoples of color,
and the settler colonialism in native lands (Chin, 2005; Fujikane & Okamura,
2008; Kurashige, 2007; Maira & Shihade, 2006). In addition, Asian American
studies scholars argue that transnational connections between Asia and the
United States are not only a core theme in the establishment and develop-
ment of the field, but also part and parcel of the contemporary realities of
diasporic movements, filial affinities, and the productions of subjects and
cultures (Chuh & Shimakawa, 2001; Espiritu, 2003).
Scholars of Filipino/a studies, in particular, punctuate the trans-Pacific
relations between the Philippines and the United States by foregrounding
the U.S. colonial regime in the Philippines from 1898 until World War II
and its ongoing neocolonial control through political, economic, and
military involvement (Go, 2003; Isaac, 2006; San Juan, 2007). Thus, for
researchers who work on Filipino/a studies in the Philippines, the United
States, and in-between, the racialization of Filipino/as is constituted not
only by the transnational flows of discourses and materials, but also more
specifically by the techniques of imperialism.

THE RACIALIZATION OF COLONIZED FILIPINO/AS

In this section, I examine U.S. visual and textual media, such as cartoons,
photographs, as well as scientific and government accounts, to shed light
on the ways in which representational constructions framed Filipino/as as
wild devil-children who necessitated White tutelage and supervision. Liter-
ary and cultural critic Homi Bhabha (1994) maintains that “the objective of
colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degen-
erate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to
establish systems of administration and instruction” (p. 70). I contend that
the discursive legibility of Filipino/as as new subjects of the U.S. empire was
construed within the hegemonic U.S. discourse of race and, in particular,
through distorted depictions of African Americans. This racial discourse
was embedded within the then-dominant Haeckelian notion of ontogeny
500 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

recapitulating phylogeny, which construed an individual’s or group’s bio-

logical and cultural development along an evolutionary scale from primi-
tive to civilized (Gould, 1977). In spite of the ethnic, socioeconomic,
spiritual, regional, and linguistic heterogeneity among Filipino/as, early
20th century, U.S. racial grammar primarily scripted Filipino/as as
“Negroes.” The U.S. racial framework dismissed the cultural diversity
within the Philippines, thereby functioning as an exclusionary technique to
foreground a particular representation for imperialist purposes.5
By exploring U.S. colonial visual culture, I intend to unpack the prevail-
ing rationalities of race and empire, especially how racialized and colonized
subjects emerge within the U.S. purview. As “sites of dense visual informa-
tion” (K. Worcester, 2007, p. 225), political cartoons simultaneously encap-
sulate issues and events in small yet influential spaces, and convey racial
imageries to promote imperialist justifications for conquest and gover-
nance (Ignacio et al., 2004). Scholars of media and policy insist that
although “American media do not have a direct role in the formulation of
foreign policy, [they] continue to have a growing influence in its imple-
mentation, explanation and articulation” (Hamid Mowlana, in Halili, 2006,
p. 5). In fact, “media are consistently used by the government as a diplo-
matic forum to help set the tone, pattern and agenda for policy matters”
(ibid.).
The political cartoons that appeared in U.S. newspapers and magazines
at the turn of the 20th century served to convey and justify U.S. global
incursions through calculated depictions of “foreign savages.” For example,
an 1898 cartoon entitled “Holding His End Up” in the Philadelphia Inquirer
shows a stars-and-stripes-clad Uncle Sam balancing five dark-skinned chil-
dren who are marked as the “Philippines,” “Porto Rico,” “Cuba,” “Hawaii,”
and “Ladrones” (now Guam and Northern Mariana Islands). Infantilized as
a child and racially construed as Black, hence visually conjuring Kipling’s
devil-child figure, the Filipino with bulging eyes, protruding lips, and
twisted, coarse hair is displayed and held high by the United States—like
the other colonized subjects—in front of well-dressed European men. The
representation of the dangling Filipino with his shorts clutched by Uncle
Sam who stands poised and proud on a platform marked “Army and Navy”
is aligned with the pro-annexation position that the Philippines needed to
be rescued and protected by the United States from other potentially
imperialist aggressors. Published at the end of the Spanish-American War
when the United States began colonial governance in the Pacific and the
Caribbean, the cartoon captures the emergence of Filipino/as in the U.S.
imaginary within the twin contexts of the comparative racialization of
communities of color and the global panorama of imperialist conquest and
control.
Because the education of Filipino/as was central to the 1898 “benevo-
lent assimilation” policy of U.S. president William McKinley (Miller, 1982),
colonial schooling was established as the antidote for the U.S. problem of
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 501

pacifying, disciplining, and civilizing Filipino/as.6 The 1901 cover of Judge

weekly magazine with “The American Policy” as its caption vividly links
education with the agenda of imperialism. The cover shows a dark-skinned
Filipino boy, dressed in loincloth and amulet, being pulled by the ear by a
formally dressed Uncle Sam with a switch in his other hand. The seemingly
insolent native is being dragged to the red-white-and-blue Liberty School
where a smiling Miss Columbia is ringing the bell and four other boys in
cultural attires signifying Native American, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, and
Cuban children are watching. This image vividly depicts the dominant
imperialist trope of racialized infantilization that positioned colonized sub-
jects under the tutelage of adult White colonizers in order for the colonized
to attain developmental maturity in the Western teleology of civilization. So
what happened inside the U.S. colonial school? What lessons and direc-
tions did the Filipino/as learn?
The 1899 cartoon entitled “School Begins” in the popular magazine Puck
offers insightful perspectives into these questions. The cartoon illustrates a
bewildered Filipino dressed in the Western style of long-sleeved shirt and
pants and seated in the front row with three other students representing
Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. All four students are looking up at the
towering, bespectacled Uncle Sam who is leaning over his desk with a stick
in hand. Underneath the image are the words of Uncle Sam’s stern lecture
to these newly arrived students: “Now, children, you’ve got to learn these
lessons whether you want to or not! But just take a look at the class ahead
of you, and remember that in a little while, you will be as glad to be here as
they are!”
My analysis of this cartoon suggests that Filipino/as had four options in
the U.S. project of race, empire, and curriculum. The first option was they
could assimilate into the U.S. norms of whiteness, represented by White
teens reading silently behind the front row. The books held by these
students, who seem to be maturing under Uncle Sam’s tutelage, denote
California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Alaska, the territories that the
expanding United States had previously acquired by war or purchase. The
second option was Filipino/as could follow the Native American who is
reading an upside-down book and sitting alone by the front door. The
Native American image signifies the boarding school policy, considered an
“education for extinction” (Adams, 1995), which removed and isolated
indigenous students from both mainstream White America and their own
communities. The third option was to be barred entry like the Chinese,
standing outside of the school door, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882. The final option was Filipino/as could become like the African
American who, due to manual-industrial training, is perched on a ladder
and is washing the classroom window with a rag and a bucket of water. Since
the options of whiteness, extinction, or exclusion were not completely
tenable for Filipino/as in the Philippines, the last option of adhering to the
policy and curriculum for African Americans in the U.S. South became the
502 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

educational template for Filipino/as across the Pacific. Through Foucault’s

archaeology, my analysis of this cartoon offers insights into the “correla-
tions” and “limits” of educational possibilities for Filipino/as and into the
process of how African American schooling became the only viable option.
The photographs taken by U.S. officials further reinforced the visual
representation of Filipino/as as degenerate and atavistic savages in the
political cartoons. In Displaying Filipinos, anthropologist Benito Vergara
(1995) maintains that photography framed the construction and prolifera-
tion of images in the early 20th-century Philippines and served as an appa-
ratus of U.S. imperialism. The photographs used by U.S. colonial
administrator and scientist Dean Conant Worcester worked precisely to
perpetuate the imperialist visualization of Filipino/as as racially Black.
Considered an “American apostle to the Philippines” (Pier, 1950), Worces-
ter was a University of Michigan zoologist who undertook two research trips
in the Philippines (1887–1888 and 1890–1893) before he was appointed to
serve as a member of two U.S. Philippine Commissions from 1899 to 1901
and as Secretary of Interior in the Philippine Insular Government from
1901 to 1913. His publications include Contributions to Philippine Ornithology
(Worcester & Bourns, 1898), The Philippine Islands and Their People (D. C.
Worcester, 1899), The Non-Christian Tribes of Northern Luzon (D. C. Worces-
ter, 1906), Slavery and Peonage in the Philippine Islands (D. C. Worcester,
1913), and The Philippines Past and Present (D. C. Worcester, 1914). As a
scientist from a well-regarded institution and a high-ranking government
official, his descriptions of Filipino/as garnered credibility, circulation, and
influence due to his status, expertise, and experience.7
Worcester’s reports and publications derived from a combined govern-
mental and scholarly interest to obtain reliable data. He indicated that
because “it was obviously impossible to draft adequate legislation for the
control and civilization of numerous savage or barbarous peoples without
reliable data on which to base it, and as such data were not available, I had
to get them for myself” (D. C. Worcester, 1914, p. 534). During his travels
in the archipelago, Worcester took copious notes and, with the assistance of
his colleague Frank S. Bourns, numerous photographs of his observations
which appeared in annual government reports and scholarly publications.
In The Philippine Islands and Their People, Worcester (1899) included
photographs of ethnic Tagbanuas in the west-central Palawan island whom
he claimed to have derived “from a half-breed race between the Negritos
(the little black aborigines in the archipelago) and some Malay tribe. At all
events, they are quite dark skinned, and their hair shows a decided ten-
dency to curl” (pp. 99–100). Throughout the book, Worcester interspersed
his detailed observations of Filipino/as with photographs of other ethnic
communities, like the Mangyans, whom he described as: “Their noses were
very flat. Their heads were covered with great shocks of black hair, which in
many instances showed a tendency to curl—due perhaps to a slight admix-
ture of Negrito blood” (p. 410). He explained the Negritos as “a wretched,
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 503

sickly race, of almost dwarfish stature. Their skins are black, their hair is
curly, their features are coarse and repulsive. . . . Mentally they stand at the
bottom of the scale, and experience seems to have proved them incapable
of civilization” (p. 438). In 1912 the National Geographic magazine published
a photograph of a fully dressed Worcester in long-sleeved shirt, slacks,
shoes, and hat, standing next to a Negrito woman who was about half his
height and wearing only a cloth tied around her waist. The image and
caption of “An Adult Negrito Woman With an American of Average Size”
delivered the overarching theme in the visual and textual techniques of
U.S. imperialism: Filipino/as as inferior even to “average” Americans.
Worcester was not alone in characterizing Filipino/as as culturally ata-
vistic and racially Black. A Washington Post article on November 30, 1902,
portrayed Filipino/as as “little, savage negritos, living away up in the moun-
tain forests. They have black skins and their hair is kinky as that of an
African.” U.S. educators in the Philippines referred to them as “little
brownies” and “pickaninnies” (Bureau of Education, 1903/1954, p. 525;
Racelis & Ick, 2001, p. 94). Since the Philippines was “remote from any
great modern civilization,” educator Mary Helen Fee (1910) remarked in
her memoir, A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines, “there is no criterion by
which the inhabitants can arrive at a correct estimate of their condition” (p.
145). Hence, the dominant racial grammar defined the condition of colo-
nized Filipino/as. Popular media, official reports, and personal correspon-
dence worked to produce and reinforce the racialization of Filipino/as
through the White hegemonic and distorted imageries of African
Americans.

AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON FILIPINO/AS

In this section, I foreground the perspectives of African Americans to
discern their views on Filipino/as and the pervasive racial connections. As
the group compared to the Filipino/as in the early 1900s, it is crucial to
attend to the ways in which they participated in and/or critiqued the U.S.
colonial project to illustrate a multidimensional transnational history of
race, empire, and curriculum. According to historian William Gatewood
(1975), African Americans took keen interest in U.S. imperialism and
particularly in the Philippines from the standpoint of “a colored minority
in a white-dominated society” (p. 284). They held “an affinity of comple-
xion with the Filipinos” and saw the “similarity between the predicament of
the black man in the United States and the brown man in the Philippines:
both were subjects of oppression” (pp. 320, 323).
African Americans who came to the Philippines, for the most part,
expressed racial sympathy toward and solidarity with Filipino/as. In 1903 T.
Thomas Fortune, owner and editor of New York Age, the leading African
American journal of news and opinion, was sent by the U.S. government “to
504 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

investigate labor and agricultural conditions in Hawaii and the Philippines,

with a view to their adaptability to the colored farm hand of the Southern
States” (Washington Post, April 12, 1903). Upon his return, Fortune con-
vened a gathering of the “best colored men in the country” where he drew
the parallel and shared conditions of African Americans and Filipino/as.
He saw African Americans as “companions of [Filipinos], for it is construed
that we stand largely where they stand—outside of the American Constitu-
tion, but under the American flag. The hazards of war make strange
bedfellows, but none stranger than this of the Afro-American and Filipino
peoples” (Washington Post, June 27, 1903).
Sojourning across the Pacific, African Americans who taught in the
Philippines included Carter G. Woodson and John Henry Manning Butler.
Woodson taught in the islands from 1903 to 1906, and planned on return-
ing if his teaching and educational prospects in the United States did not
materialize (Goggin, 1993). Known as the father of African American
history, Woodson cofounded the Association for the Study of Negro Life
and History in 1915 and established the Journal of Negro History in 1916. In
his obituary for Butler in the Journal of Negro History, Woodson called him “a
representative Negro” and “a distinguished American citizen who made a
contribution to the modernization of the Philippines” (Woodson, 1945, p.
244). In the same article, he also mentioned other “Negro teachers who
volunteered to go to that crude country immediately after pacification to
give the people a modern language and develop their minds unto modern
stature” (p. 243). The educators to whom Filipino/as “owe a debt of
gratitude” included Frederick Bonner of Connecticut; May Fitzbutler of St.
Louis, Missouri; J. F. Hart and W. H. Holder of Kansas City; and Thomas
Shaffer of Kentucky (ibid.). In Carter G. Woodson’s characterization,
African Americans played an important yet unacknowledged part in “mod-
ernizing” a “crude” Philippines, inevitably positioning African Americans
alongside White officials and educators in their collective mission as Ameri-
cans to civilize and educate the colonized.8
Perhaps one of the longest-serving U.S. educators in the Philippines,
John Henry Manning Butler began working in the Bureau of Education in
1902 by establishing schools and teaching in the northern province of
Pangasinan. He rose through the ranks and became the division superin-
tendent in the mountainous regions of Isabela and Cagayan from 1921 to
1933. After he retired from the Bureau, he continued teaching at the
National Teachers College in 1933 and the Union College of Manila in
1936 (Daniel, 1937, pp. 238–239). Although he occasionally visited the
United States, he spent almost all of his adult life in the Philippines where
he died in 1944.
As one of the few African American educators in the islands, Butler
contested the racial classification of Filipino/as as “Negroid.” In a 1934
article published in the Journal of Negro Education, he wrote, “Only a
thoughtless observer would consider the Filipino people Negroid. There
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 505

are a few tribes of pigmy-like black folks with quasi-kinky hair and other
physical characteristics which cause ethnologists to classify them with the
Negro race. . . . Whatever the meaning of civilization may be, the term
[Negro] does not refer to these simple children of mountain and forest”
(Butler, 1934, pp. 264–265). Similar to Woodson, Butler’s depiction of
these “pigmy-like” “simple children of mountain and forest” makes a clear
demarcation between African Americans and Filipino/as, belying a senti-
ment of African American superiority over Filipino/as. Yet, at the end of his
article, he pressed both African Americans and Filipino/as to learn more
about each other’s historical and contemporary conditions because
“Destiny has thrown the Negro and the Filipino under the tutelage of
America” (pp. 267–268).
Other African Americans were also keenly aware of the racial compari-
sons between them and Filipino/as. W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Wash-
ington took opposite positions in their views of racial solidarity and
competition (Alridge, 2008; Harlan, 1975, 1983). DuBois (1903) had a
more nuanced analysis of race and empire upon which transnational soli-
darities were possible. He saw the calls for African American emigration,
similar to the exploratory trip taken by Fortune to the Philippines, as
“hopeless” based on the “course of the United States toward weaker and
darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines—for where
in the world may we go and be safe from lying and brute force?” (p. 45). He
perceived the United States as a capitalist and consumerist “happy-go-lucky
nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its
Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees” (p. 122). He regarded
industrial-manual schools as “born of slavery and quickened to renewed life
by the crazy imperialism of the day” (p. 79), thereby connecting the history
of African Americans with the conditions of colonized communities.
In Booker T. Washington’s America, race was framed in Black and White
terms. In his 1895 Atlanta Exposition address, Washington (1901) called on
the “white race” to “Cast down your bucket where you are” out of concern
that the post–Reconstruction South increasingly relied on Asian laborers
whom he referred to as “those of foreign birth and strange tongue and
habits.” He portrayed Asians as threats who took employment opportunities
from African Americans, “the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unre-
sentful people” who knew their place in the United States (pp. 220–222). In
patriotic support of the Spanish-American War, he stressed that his
“race . . . is willing to die for its country” (p. 255), instead of being critical of
the recolonization of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba under the U.S.
imperialist regime. Ultimately, through his analogy of “separate as the
fingers, yet one as the hand,” he offered a narrow chauvinist vision of the U.S.
nation with a racialized terrain that excluded those not White or Black.
As the United States pursued global imperialism, Washington succinctly
captured the politics of racial taxonomy and the plight of colonized
Filipino/as. In a New York Times article on March 29, 1903, he commented
506 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

on the racial classification of Filipino/as: “If the Filipino produces hair long
enough and feet small enough, he may be classed as a white man; otherwise
he will be assigned to my race. What seems to me to be a far more important
thing than the question whether he is white or black, is that he shall not
have to go about classed and branded as a problem and not as a man.” Even
with Washington’s caution, the discursive construction of Filipino/as as
racially Black, consequently, set into motion colonial policy and curriculum
in the Philippines that derived from the schooling of African Americans in
the U.S. South.

EDUCATIONAL POLICY, CURRICULUM, AND TEACHER

PREPARATION

In this section, I delineate the material effects of the discursive construction

of colonized Filipino/as as racially Black by examining the development of
educational policy and curriculum in the Philippines, in particular through
the vision of its first General Superintendent of Public Instruction and
through the various strategies of preparing Filipino/a teachers. Distin-
guishing itself from the limited structure and academic emphasis of school-
ing during the Spanish era, the U.S. plan for mass public education in the
islands envisioned a curriculum that would reach more school-age children
and would instruct them for practical work. I contend that the prevailing
U.S. racial understanding and the dominance of manual-industrial training
for African Americans in the early 1900s underpinned the curriculum
transformation in the Philippines from a liberal arts foundation to one
geared toward manual-industrial training. However, even though there was
a decided shift toward practical work, some students navigated within and
against the constraints of the instituted policy and curriculum to exert their
agency and find avenues to fulfill their aspirations.
The U.S. policy for colonial education and curriculum in the Philippines
derived from political and education elites. A proponent of the “benevo-
lent assimilation” policy, U.S. president William McKinley asked Harvard
University president Charles W. Eliot to recommend someone who could
oversee the new educational system in the archipelago. Eliot suggested
Fred W. Atkinson, a Harvard alumnus and a Massachusetts high school
principal, who was subsequently appointed as the General Superintendent
of Public Instruction. Prior to his departure for the Philippines in 1900,
Atkinson consulted Booker T. Washington and visited Tuskegee and
Hampton, the two most prominent institutions for African American indus-
trial and teacher training. Atkinson understood that U.S. teachers in the
Philippines “must beware [of] the possibility of overdoing the matter of
higher education and unfitting the Filipino for practical work” (May, 1980,
p. 93). He maintained that “We should heed the lesson taught us in our
reconstruction period when we started to educate the negro. The educa-
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 507

tion of the masses here must be an agricultural and industrial one, after the
pattern of our Tuskegee Institute at home” (ibid.).
Atkinson’s conviction was in line with the prevailing view of Filipino/as
as atavistic savages, which justified his administration’s educational policy
and curriculum. In his book The Philippine Islands, Atkinson (1906) traced
the racial genealogy of Filipino/s from the Negritos, “the first inhabitants
of the archipelago” (p. 240): “Our earliest glimpse, indeed, reveals a race of
very low type . . . from which are descended the Negritos, or little
negroes—small, black, extremely shy, and without fixed abodes, with
closely curling hair, flat noses, thick lips, and clumsy feet” (p. 59). Marshal-
ing both photographs and observations, he described them as “true
savages . . . [who] seem to be the survival of the unfittest, and are physical
and mental weaklings” (p. 241). His genealogical tracing of Filipino/as
deriving from “a race of very low type” buttressed the U.S. imperialist
mission to install a modern, Western educational system that would puta-
tively advance the colonized from ignorance and backwardness to literacy,
modernity, and maturity.
In addition, Atkinson intended to make the U.S. public school system in
the Philippines distinct from the Spanish version that existed before. He
wanted a secular and practical education that was available to more stu-
dents with English as the primary language of instruction. In his 1903
annual report, Atkinson indicated that during the Spanish era, formal
schooling from primary to the university was limited to Spanish, native
elite, and mestizo (mixed-race) children, and was controlled by Catholic
religious orders. From the onset of Spanish rule in 1465 “until 1863 no
attempt whatever was made to put rudimentary instruction within the reach
of the great mass of the school population” which “perpetuated among
them an ignorance which was a stumbling block in the way of their advance-
ment and a barrier to their proper appreciation of the beneficent inten-
tions of Government and its constituted authorities” (Bureau of Education,
1903/1954, p. 230). In 1863, Spain issued a royal decree to establish
elementary schools in the Philippines (Alzona, 1932). By 1886, according
to Atkinson’s report, there were 1,052 schools for boys and 1,091 schools
for girls with an average of 40 to 50 students per school. With Spanish as the
language of instruction, the primary curriculum consisted of Christian
doctrine, reading and writing, geography, and mathematics (Bureau of
Education, 1903/1954, p. 231).
In establishing a mass public school system in the Philippines, the
Bureau of Education was successful in increasing the attendance of school-
age population. In 1902, there were about 2,000 schools and about 150,000
students; by the end of the decade, there were 4,531 schools and 451,938
students, tripling the number of students since the beginning of its opera-
tions (Bureau of Education, 1910/1957, p. 306). While historical accounts
of the Philippines note the expansion of educational opportunities from
the Spanish to the U.S. colonial eras (Alzona, 1932; May, 1980; Rutland,
508 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

1955), the significance of race in structuring school policy and curriculum

(Kramer, 2006) is under-explored. As I will further demonstrate, U.S. racial
discourse and African American education, especially the tension between
academic and manual-industrial instruction, inflected the colonial policy
and curriculum in the Philippines. This can be discerned in the following
comment from a U.S. Southern legislator quoted in the New York Times on
January 14, 1899: the “experience of the South for the past thirty years with
the negro race” would become “lessons of wisdom for our guidance in the
Philippines.”
Although U.S. educators were recruited to teach in the Philippines
(Racelis & Ick, 2001), it became immediately apparent to colonial officials
that more Filipino/a teachers were needed to accomplish the task of
developing a national public school system. The Bureau of Education
aggressively recruited, and the number of Filipino/a teachers more than
quadrupled from about 2,000 in 1902 to 8,275 in 1910 (Bureau of Educa-
tion, 1910/1957, p. 306). The Bureau utilized four main strategies to
prepare teachers: (1) after-school sessions, (2) vacation institutes, (3)
normal schools, and (4) government scholarships to U.S. colleges and
universities. The most common were the first two strategies: the daily
one-hour classes after school and the four- to five-week vacation institutes,
both conducted by U.S. educators (Bureau of Education, 1903/1954, p.
787). In these strategies of teacher preparation, local teachers often
“taught during the week what they themselves had learned during the week
previous” (Rutland, 1955, p. 34).
One of the widely used training texts was The Filipino Teacher’s Manual by
H. C. Theobald (1907), a Stanford University graduate and principal of the
Batangas provincial high school in the Philippines. Divided into two parts,
the manual’s first half addressed general educational issues, such as school
organization, discipline, and moral training; the teachers’ relationships
with students, parents, and communities; and the teachers’ dispositions,
habits, and outside studies. The second half focused on specific subject
areas, such as English, arithmetic, geography, history, civics, nature study,
industrial training, physiology and hygiene, music, penmanship, and
drawing.
Although Theobald’s manual emphasized a liberal arts foundation,
within the first decade of the 1900s the curriculum for Filipino/a teachers
became a contest between an academic and a manual-industrial emphasis,
similar to the struggle of African American education in the United States
(Anderson, 1988). For instance, a 1903 program for daily after-school and
vacation sessions showcased the initial dominance of the academic curricu-
lum, which focused on English (grammar, composition, and literature),
math (arithmetic), social sciences (history, government, and geography),
and science (plant and animal studies, physiology, and hygiene). Teachers
were given supplementary instruction in school administration and class-
room pedagogy as well as in agriculture, arts, and handicrafts (Bureau of
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 509

Education, 1903/1954, pp. 787–791). However, by 1908 the Bureau’s

courses for teachers shifted to manual-industrial training as the curricular
focal point. Overshadowing the academic subjects, the course offerings
included gardening and agriculture, woodworking and drawing, silk
culture, the care and decoration of schoolhouses and grounds, the weaving
of mats, baskets, fans, and hats, and the weaving, spinning, dyeing, and
bleaching of cloth (Bureau of Education, 1908/1957, p. 127). While the
academic subjects prevailed in the early years of educating teachers, indus-
trial training took a more prominent position in their ensuing curriculum.
The struggles between academic and manual-industrial curriculum also
manifested in the normal and secondary schools, the third strategy in
preparing teachers. The Philippine Normal School in the capital city of
Manila was known to offer a strong academic curriculum. Whereas gradu-
ates of intermediate schools could teach the primary grades, only those who
completed normal school training could teach secondary students. The
entrance requirement of the Philippine Normal School included arith-
metic (through long division) and English proficiency in speaking and
reading (with the Baldwin Second Reader as the minimum standard). Its
4-year curriculum consisted of 4 years of English, 4 years of mathematics, 3
years of geography, 3 years of science, 2 years of history, drawing and music
for the first-year students, and professional training for the fourth-year
students (Bureau of Education, 1903/1954, pp. 452–457). By 1905, the
Normal School began to make plans for domestic science and manual
instruction. With gardening for three periods per week, students grew
vegetables and conducted agricultural experiments. They also examined
seeds, soils, plant foods, water, harmful insects, and methods of growing
and harvesting crops (Bureau of Education, 1905/1954, p. 972).
As the highest institution for teacher training, the Philippine Normal
School became the most prominent public educational center in the early
1900s. Private Catholic institutions of higher learning, such as the Univer-
sity of Santo Tomas (founded in 1611), existed and were primarily geared
toward the training of men for theology, law, medicine, and philosophy.
The University of the Philippines, the country’s first state institution of
higher education, opened in 1908, but its College of Education was not
organized until 1913 (Alzona, 1932). Many Filipino/as therefore saw the
Normal School as a key that opened access to employment and status in the
U.S.-controlled system.
Although the Normal School’s original purpose was to produce teach-
ers, by 1905 it enlarged its scope to prepare Filipino/as “for professional
schools in general or for college courses” (Bureau of Education, 1905/
1954, p. 970). By 1907, 99 men and women graduated with normal diplo-
mas, and 4 completed the literary course. The following year, there were
344 students enrolled in various courses of study: 75 were preparing for
medicine; 67 were in the course for literature, science, and history; 41
for nursing; 33 for law; 33 for engineering; 18 for agriculture; and 17 for
510 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

domestic science. Out of 344 students, only 60 were enrolled in the course
for teaching. As interest in the other courses increased, U.S. officials
lamented that the “fundamental purpose of the [Normal School] as a
training center for teachers for the entire Archipelago [was] not being
fulfilled” (Bureau of Education, 1908/1957, p. 110). The “legitimate func-
tion of the Normal School was in a measure lost sight of” and the Bureau
could no longer depend on it to train teachers (Bureau of Education,
1910/1957, p. 292). Filipino/as, however, saw the expansion of the cur-
riculum differently. From their vantage point, the varied courses of study
enabled them to pursue a liberal arts or professional preparation which
provided better employment opportunities and remuneration.
Many U.S. colonial administrators believed that “the quickest and surest
way” for Filipino/as to “arrive at an understanding of Western civilization”
was “to live among Americans in the United States and be taught in Ameri-
can schools” (Racelis & Ick, 2001, p. 224). By studying and living abroad,
Filipino/as were “to gain knowledge of American life, education, and
government.” Those selected were “promising teachers who have shown
considerable capacity in learning our language and educational methods
and who have appeared interested in our [U.S.] history and political insti-
tutions.” When they returned to the Philippines, they were expected to give
“lectures in the towns of their provinces, describing what our country is,
what its people do, what its history is, and what America has done in
rescuing them from Spain, and what it plans to do in the future” (Bureau
of Education, 1901/1954, p. 7). This fourth strategy of preparing teachers
by sending them abroad was “not alone for the academic education which
they can receive, but for the broader and more impressive education of
daily life in the United States, in contact with its greatness and activity”
(Bureau of Education, 1902/1954, p. 97).
The Philippine Commission passed Act No. 854 in 1903 to select and
sponsor Filipino/a government scholars or pensionado/as to study in the
United States. By 1910, a total of 207 students matriculated in U.S. colleges
and universities (Bureau of Education, 1910/1957, p. 297). Although the
initial objective of the policy to send Filipino/as abroad was to produce
teachers who could carry out the U.S. priorities in the islands, its scope as
an international education program, like that of the Philippine Normal
School, expanded to include other courses of study. Noting the preference
of students for more academic or liberal arts preparation, the first super-
intendent of Filipino/a students in the United States, William Alexander
Sutherland, recommended that students should “adopt a course which,
while it may not result in the most considerable future pecuniary benefit to
the student himself, will in all probability result in the greatest possible
good to his fellow-countrymen” (Bureau of Education, 1905/1954, p. 797).
In line with the prevailing colonial policy for “practical” courses and against
any “academic” curriculum that may challenge U.S. rule, Sutherland
declared that “Agriculture, normal and engineering courses, with perhaps
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 511

the medical, but to the exclusion of the legal profession and the merely
clerical or business professions, are believed to be such beneficial courses.
It has even been recommended by the undersigned that few or no students
desiring to pursue the legal profession be sent to this country for study, and
that all agree to teach, if called upon, when they return to the Philippine
Islands, irrespective of the course followed in America” (ibid.).
Articulated to serve “the greatest possible good” in the Philippines, the
U.S. educational policy insisted on directing Filipino/as toward practical
trades, like woodwork, carpentry, and domestic science, and toward “ben-
eficial courses,” such as agriculture, teaching, and engineering. Simulta-
neously it dismissed preparation for the legal, business, and even medical
professions. This colonial educational agenda privileged the training and
production of workers of industries, fields, schools, homes, and buildings,
and marginalized the development of high-status professionals who could
potentially contest the debilitating political, economic, and scientific con-
ditions of empire in their own country. The push for a manual-industrial
curriculum to racialized and colonized communities ultimately belied a
seemingly benevolent yet deeply insidious agenda to keep them at the
mercy of those who held the reigns of power.

THE DOMINANCE OF THE MANUAL-INDUSTRIAL CURRICULUM

Although the initial educational focus was academically based on the
liberal arts, manual-industrial training became the dominant curriculum
halfway through the first decade of the 1900s. Out of the four main strat-
egies used by the Bureau of Education to prepare teachers (after-school
sessions, vacation institutes, normal schools, and study abroad in the
United States), those who attended the after-school and vacation-institute
sessions were the ones most impacted by the shift from academic to
manual-industrial curriculum. Even though teachers who attended the
normal schools in the Philippines and the pensionado/as who studied in the
United States were also affected by the shift, its impact was mediated by
other available options in the broadened courses of study. In addition,
graduates of the normal schools often became teachers in secondary
schools where the academic curriculum persisted. The U.S.-trained
pensionado/as who entered the field of education primarily gained employ-
ment at the secondary or university settings where the liberal arts subjects
dominated.
The material effects of the curricular difference between academic and
manual-industrial schooling manifested in the education that the over-
whelming majority of Filipino/as received. According to the Bureau of
Education (1910/1957, pp. 306–326), the Philippines had a total popula-
tion of over 7.2 million in 1910. Although there were over 1.2 million
school-aged children between 6 and 16 years old, only 451,938 were
512 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

enrolled in the public schools. Because private parochial schools had

limited enrollment, it seemed that based on these numerical data more
than half of the school-aged population were not attending school and
were not receiving any formal type of instruction. Out of those who were
enrolled in the public schools, 95.7% were attending the primary grades of
1, 2, and 3; 3.7% were in the intermediate grades of 4, 5, and 6; and a
measly 0.6% were in the 4-year secondary program.
What was the consequence of the colonial curriculum to the different
students enrolled in the public school system? Since the manual-industrial
curriculum was geared toward teachers working at the primary and inter-
mediate levels (grades 1 to 6), over 99% of students in the early 1900s were
principally exposed to an education for industrial and manual vocations.
The very select few who reached the secondary schools and eventually
obtained university degrees became members of the academic and, if not
already, the social, economic, and political elite. In a highly stratified
country like the Philippines, with seemingly insurmountable cleavages
separating the upper class and the aspiring bourgeois from the working
poor, the liberal arts academic curriculum for the privileged few and the
manual-industrial curriculum for the overwhelming majority further exac-
erbated the gap between these segments of the population with different
socio-economic structures, resources, and trajectories.
Although manual-industrial education was implemented in various
degrees in all schools, Filipino/as of various standings viewed it differ-
ently. The elites and the bourgeois saw it as demeaning and useless and
found ways to circumvent the tasks, for instance, by having their servants
complete them (Racelis & Ick, 2001). However, others believed in its
moral and economic benefits. The municipal president of Calumpit
believed in its importance because “the pupils get to know that by honest
labor, no matter how insignificant it may be, one may get a profitable
gain; they learn the dignity of labor; their hands are trained to work in
harmony with their brains; and they get to know how to turn materials
that otherwise would be useless into useful and marketable articles”
(Racelis & Ick, 2001, p. 199).9
The implementation of the manual-industrial curriculum worked well
with the economic interest of the United States to export Philippine goods
for foreign interest and consumption. The colonial government actively
pursued the exposure of Philippine arts and crafts in international venues,
such as the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1915 Panama
Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California, to attract
potential markets and consumers for ethnic and native goods. In the 1904
World’s Fair, the head of the Philippine exhibit displayed “what the gov-
ernment schools have accomplished” such as products created by manual
and commercial training programs in Ilocos Sur, Pangasinan, Manila,
Laguna, Iloilo, and the southern Moro region (Philippine Islands, 1904,
p. 35).
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 513

The focus on marketable and commercial goods became part of the

driving force in the school curricular transformation. The Bureau of Edu-
cation’s 1907 Statement of Organization and Aims indicated an increasing
emphasis in manual-industrial training to be implemented in the third and
fourth grades. Intermediate students were taught tool work, agriculture,
and housekeeping. Aside from the academic and normal courses in high
school, three vocational courses were offered (commerce, agriculture, and
arts and trades). It was clear by the Bureau’s 1911 Statement of Organization
and Aims that the U.S. colonial government was invested in “prepar[ing]
boys and girls in a practical way for the industrial, commercial, and domes-
tic activities in which they are later to have a part.”10
By the time the United States pursued global imperialism, manual-
industrial education had been a part of its school curricular structure.
Tracing its history since the end of the Civil War, Herbert Kliebard (1999)
suggests that manual-industrial instruction had been instituted for those
who “require remedial treatment for one reason or another” (p. 13). For
racialized minorities, such as African Americans, this type of curriculum
was also imbued with moral and social values that stressed redemption,
discipline, and the work ethic. Drawing on W. E. B. DuBois’s coauthored
study in 1912 entitled The Negro American Artisan, Kliebard (1999) notes that
less emphasized in their training were technical and adaptable job skills
required in changing industry and labor markets that could lead to employ-
ment flexibility and economic independence. A similar pattern could be
seen in the Philippines where the majority of teachers and students worked
under a curriculum geared toward the interest, consumption of and,
hence, dependence upon external markets as opposed to the enrichment
and sustainability of local communities. By relying on foreign external
markets for Filipino/a labor and products, a culture of dependency was
created, a condition that remains to haunt the Philippines to this day.

CONCLUSION

The history of colonized nations offers somber and sobering lessons about
the technologies and legacies of Western imperialism whose effects con-
tinue to regulate and constrain the lives and opportunities of the majority
in the global South. By foregrounding the educational history of the
Philippines under U.S. rule, I call into question the hegemonic narrative of
exceptionalism in the United States that, through historical amnesia or
selective interpretation of history, disavows its imperialist past and present.
I also take to task the self-righteous mission of benevolent altruism among
educators who defensively dismiss their complicity in colonial and neoco-
lonial operations. My historical accounting is facilitated by a transnational
unit of analysis that disrupts the rigid boundaries of geopolitical nation-
states and attends to the border-crossing flows of people, ideas, goods,
514 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

cultures, and institutions, albeit not necessarily reciprocal to the same

degree. A transnational perspective enables the examination of the histori-
cal and contemporary dynamics between nation-states that inquire into
their convergences, interconnectivities, and relations of power. Between
the United States and the Philippines, empire has structured their origi-
nary and ongoing relations.
In addition, empire works alongside race as organizing principles to
normalize and discipline colonized subjects. Historian Eric Love (2004)
underscores that “Race is and will remain a vital part of the story of
American imperialism” (p. 1). By the early 1900s, the United States had
developed a racial grammar based on distorted views of African Americans
that inflected and were transposed upon Filipino/as. Popular media, offi-
cial government reports, and personal correspondence participated in the
discursive construction of colonized Filipino/as as racially Black, a power-
ful symbolic figure that circulated within the United States and across the
Pacific. As the basis of comparison, African Americans were sympathetic
toward Filipino/as in their shared racial oppression, but at times asserted
their modernity and superiority as Americans in their self-assessment, inevi-
tably reinforcing White hegemonic depictions of Filipino/as as primitive,
atavistic savages. Thus, the emergence of Filipino/as within the U.S. imagi-
nary came about through the intertwined contexts of global imperialism
and comparative racialization.
The prevailing U.S. racial grammar which scripted the legibility of
Filipino/as as racialized and colonized subjects dramatically shaped the
U.S. colonial policy and curriculum in the Philippines. U.S. officials and
educators used an existing and proven model to instruct racialized minori-
ties in the U.S. South as a template for their experiment to educate their
newly acquired subjects abroad. The transnational elaboration and imple-
mentation of the curriculum for African Americans toward Filipino/as
produced a strikingly similar result: the production of a two-tiered educa-
tional program for different segments and different destinies—a liberal arts
academic focus for the select few and an industrial-manual one for the
majority. In the Philippines, the elites, bourgeois, and scholarship students
who attended secondary schools, colleges, and universities were prepared
for professional and lucrative futures, while the overwhelming majority
only received rudimentary education and were geared toward manual and
vocational destinies.
Finally, by mobilizing Foucault’s concept of archaeology in my transna-
tional history of race, empire, and curriculum, I draw attention to the
emergence of Filipino/as as racialized and colonized subjects as well as the
conditions of existence in the development of the public school system in
the Philippines under U.S. rule. Archaeology has enabled me to suture
both the imperialist relations of power between the United States and the
Philippines and the transnational connections of race between African
Americans and Filipino/as in the early 1900s. As this article demonstrates,
RACE, EMPIRE, AND CURRICULUM 515

race and empire colluded to produce a particular regime of truth about

colonized subjects that materially structured education policy, curriculum,
and lived trajectories. The discursive construction of Filipino/as not only
reveals the pervasiveness of White supremacist views in U.S. domestic and
imperialist spheres, but also set into motion a segmented educational
program that perpetuated and buttressed sociocultural and economic dis-
parities in highly stratified societies. In other words, how those in power
construe racialized and colonized Others indelibly shapes the type of edu-
cation provided to them. Discourse matters, after all.

NOTES
Research for this article was supported by an AERA/Spencer Pre-Dissertation Fel-
lowship and grants from The Ohio State University, Otterbein College, and Miami
University. Much appreciation goes to Ken Goings, Cynthia Dillard, Judy Wu, Joe
Ponce, and the Lakeside Collective for their comments on earlier versions. I also
thank Dennis Thiessen and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive
feedback.

1. See Miller (1982) and Kramer (2006) for historical accounts of the Spanish-
American and Philippine-American Wars, which spanned from 1898 until the
early 1910s.

2. See Paulet (2007) for the transfer of American Indian educational lessons to
the Philippines.

3. In my observation, U.S. education scholars working on issues of race primarily

draw on the traditions and priorities of ethnic studies, multicultural education,
culturally relevant/responsive teaching and, more recently, critical race and
postcolonial theories. A few engage and affiliate with the field of curriculum
studies as it is currently constituted.

4. A recent study that exemplifies this direction is James D. Anderson’s (2007)

deconstruction of the “mythology of a color-blind Constitution” through a
multiethnic history that intertwines “Blacks and Whites in the Confederate
states” with “Native Americans on the Plains and Chinese on the Pacific Coast”
(pp. 257, 250).

5. An examination of the official documents of the U.S.–controlled Bureau of

Education indicates an awareness of the cultural diversity in the Philippines. In
his 1902 annual report, Fred Atkinson included extracts from division super-
intendents (Bureau of Education, 1902/1954). For instance, in the northern
Ilocano provinces, the majority of the inhabitants were deemed to belong into
three classes: pure-blood natives, Spanish-mestizo, and Chinese mestizo. Much
smaller in number were indigenous ethnic groups, such as Igorrotes and Neg-
ritos (pp. 73–74). The report also referenced socioeconomic class distinctions
(a small upper-class elite, a slightly larger middle-class constituency, and a
predominantly peasant and laboring class), and various religious and spiritual
sectors (primarily Christian; a smaller Muslim community, mostly located in the
southern part of the country; and pagan/animist believers among the indig-
516 ROLAND SINTOS COLOMA

enous ethnic groups). The Bureau of Education was originally constituted as 17

school divisions that spanned across the country’s over 7,100 islands and over
100 languages and dialects.

6. The use of education by the U.S. government as a tool to pacify Filipino/as can
be gleaned from General Arthur MacArthur’s support for a substantial financial
appropriation for school purposes: “This appropriation is recommended pri-
marily and exclusively as an adjunct to military operations calculated to pacify
the people and to procure and expedite the restoration of tranquility through-
out the archipelago” (in Constantino, 1966/1987, p. 45).

7. In Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault (1972) highlights the speaking subject, the

institutional site, and the subject’s position or status as legitimating factors in
discursive formations (pp. 50–53).

8. Further research is needed to fully understand the experiences and perspec-

tives of African Americans in the Philippines during this period.

9. A fuller treatment of the perspectives of Filipino/as during this time period will
be the focus of a separate article.

10. Here I begin to point out the use and export of colonized labor and goods for
foreign consumption, rather than for local sustainable development. More
research is necessary to study the long-term development of manual-industrial
education in the Philippines, especially as a component of U.S. imperialism and
contemporary neocolonialism.

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