Big Bad Bayo

Lest Bayo think that a short three-sentence apology from its vice president is enough. Lest Bayo imagine that a flurry of memes is good publicity still.   Lest they are ready to milk the noise that has surrounded this “What’s your mix?” campaign for all its worth and spin it by having these five girls Jasmine, Ana, Nikita, Margo and Kharu talk about how Filipino they are, or how much they love that percentage of them that’s Pinay.   Lest Bayo think they don’t need to reassess and cancel this campaign altogether, because maybe it’s that long copy that’s the problem here. Lest they take their sweet good time pulling those ads, given reports that they are taking all of it down.   The answer is no, Bayo. In fact at this point, the only logical and correct thing to do is to immediately take down those ads and write a proper public apology to every Filipina who was offended by this campaign – I don’t care that your store windows and billboards will be empty for a while. And that apology should extend to Filipina-foreigners who are being told here that the blood that courses through their veins is to be spoken of on the same level as picking which clothes to mix and match on any given day. Of course one can rationalize, whoever thought of this campaign would say, that at the core of this is the notion of identity: as with fashion, so with blood? You can mix and match your clothes, as you can have a mix of Filipino and foreign blood?   But this hits on identity politics, as it does on issues of race and hybridity, as it does on the crises of women’s images in this country, and there lies its complexity beyond Bayo’s imagination. This proves how this campaign is so ill-conceived, it actually set itself up for this backlash; at the very least and at the simplest of levels, it must be called out for being insensitive, at most it is nothing but irresponsible.   Which of course might be said as well about the current landscape of women’s images on these shores, as dictated by advertising, as dictated by the dominance of a beauty industry that values a particularly white-skinned, thin-bodied, straight-haired image of being Pinay. The relationship between this aesthetic and the proliferation of the white Filipina-foreigner in the sphere of popular culture is a foregone conclusion. That we are silenced by these images, that a generation of Filipino girls will think they are nothing but how they look, is the price that we are paying.   To Bayo’s credit, it was trying to do something different here, where the Filipina-foreigner is not just white Filipina-American (or Australian for that matter), but also Filipina-Indian (70%-30%), Filipina-British (60%-40%), African-Filipina (60%-40%), and Chinese-Filipina (80%-20%). That this meant a celebration as well of diverse skin colors is not new – hello, United Colors of Benetton. But unlike the latter, what this celebration of difference hits at is not just diversity in general, but Filipina identity in particular.   That is, being Filipina and something else, which is really all that this campaign is about. And no, anyone who thinks this is about racism, i.e., that it is anti-Filipino, misses the point – there is after all also no way to measure Filipino-ness versus the hyphenated mixed race Filipinas of this ad.   What this ad does in fact is celebrate Filipina blood, yours and mine, but its failing is that it deems more valuable those who have another blood thrown into the mix. The absurdity is in precisely those percentages, as if blood can truly be divided in this manner, as if one’s identity can be defined through these demarcations, and ultimately, as if Filipina-ness might be measured at all by saying that your dead great great grandmother was Filipina and therefore you are 5% such.   This is not so much to question the Filipina-ness of those who are born to interracial parents, as it is to insist that the discourse on mixed races cannot be over-simplified in this manner. There is nothing simple to begin with about questions of identity, and anyone who thinks that this kind of “diversity” is our identity is just wrong, especially since these different configurations of being Filipina are used as the scale against which our successes might be measured. Especially since these different configurations, in the end, only point to identity to be about something as superficial as skin color.   This campaign also reeks of this recent inexplicable propensity to claim every Filipino-foreigner as Filipino, accompanied by another grand claim of Filipino pride. When in fact we would be doing the Filipino-foreigner a favor if we stopped calling them by their hyphens and just insisted they are Filipino full stop. When in fact it would’ve been infinitely more powerful to have called all these five girls with Filipino and Australian, Chinese, Indian, African blood of the Bayo campaign as Filipinas, full stop. That would’ve at least rendered the skin whitening and fakery industry speechless. But more importantly it would tell us all that Bayo celebrates the Filipina in every color.   Except that it doesn’t. Were it celebrating the Filipina in this way, were it actually talking about Filipina pride, the first thing it would do is hire a morena model to stand with the rest of ‘em. The second thing would be to get a real-bodied, real-looking Filipina, that we cannot help but be proud of. Oh wait, Bayo did that with Lea Salonga, which was the one reason I even started buying Bayo at all.   Ah but look at how far they’ve come! Look at how low their discourse on being Pinay and Proud has become: where it is unapologetically about the physical, where its celebration of biraciality is premised on the ability to claim these women as ours, where it is shamelessly about putting down every other Filipina who isn’t mixed race.   Filipina pride never 100% killed your spirit so. — GMA News