Philippine-American Enlightenment

This statement claims that due to the fact that European and U.S colonial powers were a product of the European Enlightenment, they believed in the equality of all human beings. The Japanese also believed that within the spheres of race and culture, they shared these similarities with their colonized subjects. Therefore, European, U.S. and Japanese colonial endeavors were not a product of racist discrimination but a tactic developed to lift the status of women within in the areas that they colonized. I do not agree with this statement because as much as their intensions could have been to further social equality, the way in which colonial apparatuses obtained their power automatically painted the colonized body as the ‘other,’ thus inherently …show more content…
Army. Throughout this war, Filipino individuals were characterized and constituted as ‘savages,’ (Kramer, 2006, Pg. 172) mostly in relation to and to juxtapose the agency of American soldiers. Filipinos were considered a class ‘beneath our notice’ (Kramer, 2006, Pg. 192), as civilized individuals fought conventional wars while savage people participated in guerilla warfare (Kramer, 2006, Pg. 172). These frameworks were simply projections that aided in constructing a hierarchy in which the racialized body is either left out of entirely or placed in the bottom ranks of. Within this sphere of domination, Filipino bodies were regarded as ‘different’ from shooting other white bodies (Kramer, 2006, Pg. 192). It was constructed as if the U.S army was fighting ‘savages’ not other soldiers (Kramer, 2006, Pg. 192), thus implementing and implicating new racial formations that were situated in a discourse of difference and ‘othering.’ Therefore, through a colonial hierarchy U.S powers were able to dictate who or what is considered ‘human,’ civilized or barbaric through the simple basis of