Here’s favorite line from all of Quinito’s articles about the CJ Giles saga: “The final straw was when he invited his youthful teammates to his apartment for a drinking session that lasted until the wee hours. Eala pulled the plug before Giles made things worse for the team with his negative influence.”

I just love how Quinito makes it out like Giles had physically forced the little angels of Smart Gilas to go get drunk with him. What are they, 13?

It’s silly, because the Gilas members are well-educated young men who have been playing competitive basketball their whole lives. I imagine that these guys, the best and the brightest of Philippine college basketball, would be able to say no to too much drinking, no matter how persuasive their import could be, right?

Oh, but since Giles is out of the team and of the country, it’s all right to pile on the guy now.

(I guess this is the best time as any to share this image sent in by a reader showing the evil Giles forcing his teammates to go out drinking with him.)



It’s funny, but, deserved or not, it’s such a predictable reaction from a lot of sportswriters whenever an import loses his cool in a game, or is reported to party too hard off the court. As Rafe Bartholomew once joked in a previous discussion on this blog: “I'm pretty sure they teach the anti-import article/column in the first week of Pinoy Sports Writer Academy.”

(True enough, Quinito handles an annual sports writing workshop at UST’s national journalism fellowship. But I digress.)

In that same discussion, I mentioned how I suspect that the attitude towards imports is only emblematic another problem in Philippine society: racism. In Philippine basketball, racism, or at the very least, lack of sensitivity towards racial matters, manifests itself when dealing with imports.

Consider, for example, how coaches, team managers, and writers talk about imports in the same manner that Americans talk about used cars; an unsatisfactory reinforcement, just like a defective car, is called a lemon. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the history of African slaves in America would cringe at the way these African-American athletes are objectified.

Last year, after Barack Obama won the US elections, Howie Severino opened a can of worms with an entry in his blog about racism by Filipinos in the United States. He cited a story from the Asian Journal Online, a Filipino-American news paper, which detailed the racist behavior of some of the leaders of the Filipino community in the United States. I couldn’t find the original article, but examples are dime-a-dozen on the Internet. Francis Acero, a lawyer and a writer, blogged in painful detail about the ugly attitudes of his own family members who are living in the States towards Obama, and how these attitudes are exacerbated by their American experience:

These folks of mine are Catholic, financially stable, and pseudo-white. They are also the most racist people I know (next to the Chinese back here who won’t let their children marry someone of another race unless they were white or loaded with cash). Because they live in Southern California, my folks have come to see the worst of ghetto/gangsta culture in the face. They survived the worst of the LA riots and other instances of black violence. Because of that experience and their general experience handling sassy black characters (no other way to describe their encounters), my folks have come to the conclusion that black Americans are the worst characters on the planet.

Howie, meanwhile, goes back to the root of the problem: “Filipino racism of course is rooted in an inferiority complex we inherited from being treated like inferiors by pale Spaniards for four centuries. Yet one would expect educated Filipinos to overcome this weakness and not act like the least educated white Americans.”

Rafe then posted a thoughtful reply on his blog about the matter:

It never surprised me that racial attitudes in the Philippines were a bit behind those in the U.S., since the Philippines has a much different racial history. Both countries have their baggage, but the States has to deal with the legacy of slavery, which is where racism against African-Americans comes from. There are relatively so few black immigrants or half-black Filipinos that it's not a surprise that the Philippines hasn't had to come to terms with that kind of racism.

You definitely see it in basketball, where imports are lauded as athletes but viewed with a sharp-edged paternalism, where teams spy on their black American players to make sure they aren't running wild like the O.G. Black Superman, Billy Ray Bates. When imports are in public, people try to touch their hair or ask why it's so curly, ignorant racism that most players graciously ignore. It's like because most Pinoys see relatively few black people, they've never had to update their dated, racist attitudes about them.

It's interesting that Howie Severino framed his blog in terms of Filipino-Americans, because of the generational divide in that group, where many older Fil-Ams exhibit the kind of racism Howie wrote about, but younger Fil-Ams identify with American youth culture, so much of which comes from black trendsetters. Plus, if they play basketball, their idols are black NBA players, and their teammates are probably black, too. I've heard young Fil-Ams say, sometimes with pride and sometimes with annoyance, that they're known as the blackest of the Asians, i.e. they're good at breakdancing, basketball, DJing, etc. It's a generational dichotomy that somebody who's done some real research will have to parse out better than I have here.

Of course, this issue is too big for this blog, or any online discussion, to tackle completely. For further reading, I’ve heard good things about the book “Pareng Barack: Filipinos in Obama’s America” by Filipino-American journalist Benjamin Pimentel. I would also recommend the work of Pulitzer-Prize winner Alex Tizon, another Filipino-American (and incidentally a colleague at my day job), about his visits to the homeland.

To end this post on a more hopeful note, research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that exposure to the Internet and online social networks can improve the comfort level with people of another race. Research has also shown that Filipinos are the most prolific users of social networks on the Internet.