BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre who presented the band to the media, is herself an example of a young person who overcame hardship and sexual abuse as a child as she said in her memoir and eventually graduated with a Master of Public Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (SIPA) in 2003. She is a highly qualified black, gay woman that served under President Barack Obama and continued with President Joe Biden.
In the Philippines, the incoming administration would do well to select people for public office based on ability and qualification and not personal looks, political connections, and cronyism. Sadly, there is much discrimination and racism in the Philippines where many people in the middle and upper class have been convinced that when it comes to skin color, white is right. They spend lavishly on dangerous, mercury-laced skin whitening creams promoted by cosmetic companies to emulate and imitate the sickly, bleached white-skinned celebrities and some movie stars.
They wrongly reject and despise their own natural skin color and “kayumanggi” heritage, considering it as inferior and unworthy of them. They fail to see and appreciate the natural beauty of their own heritage. Worst of all, they are endangering their health with these racist products.
The dedicated Filipino EcoWaste Coalition is campaigning to end the sale of mercury-laced skin whiteners. Eight brands of these dangerous products are identified on http://ecowastecoalition.blogspot.com
The World Health Organization (WHO) lists the damages: kidney damage, skin rashes, skin discoloration, scarring, reduction in the skin’s resistance to bacterial and fungal infections, anxiety, depression, psychosis, and peripheral neuropathy.
Racism is not only in skin whitening products but firstly in the culture. Filipino indigenous peoples are treated as inferior people by an elite oligarchy composed of dynastic families that devour the indigenous ancestral lands to extract minerals causing environmental destruction and greater poverty and oppression. They have ruled with disastrous consequences for generations where one-third of the Philippine population survives at various levels of poverty. Many thousands of neglected and forgotten Filipinos (until election time) survive on the garbage and recycled left-over food from the plates of restaurant diners.
The rich and wealthy live in a luxurious cocoon of ignorance and apathy while millions go hungry. The ruling elite have no shame, no national pride to make the Philippines a nation of fully educated people and a prosperous, poverty-free nation in the world community. They have allowed it to become a nation owned by a few, super rich in an ocean of beggars, slum dwellers, and uneducated poor and a heavily taxed, struggling middle class.
They don’t care that hundreds of thousands of children are sexually abused in their impoverished families and sold over the internet as sex slaves by human traffickers for the satisfaction of foreign sex tourists and pedophiles. The new administration will need more than a Korean boy band to change this shocking reality and build a nation based on justice and equality. (preda.org)
