The Imperialism of Race: Class, Rights, and Patronage in the Philippine Carceral City

• In Event: The Violation and Defense of Rule of Law Across Time

Abstract

Decisions by the US Supreme Court in the Insular Cases at the end of the Spanish American War facilitated US expansionism by laying the foundations of penal law—a two-tiered system of rights—in the Philippines and other territories. As the Court deliberated boundaries of US citizenship, politicians and media were extending race-based practices of American governance into administration of the Philippine colony through Congressional speeches and graphic caricatures that racialized Filipinos as underdeveloped and threatening humans. Practices of territorial governance drew on law and patron-client relationships to create a new Filipino elite and bring them into collaboration with colonial authorities and cultural imperialism; in this way, the racial patterning of white American/Filipino relations was transduced into class relations among Filipinos that continue to stratify Philippine society.
This article draws on textual analysis and urban ethnography to examine colonial production of white Americans and ‘black’ Filipinos and a transduction of race relations into class that extends constitutional rights to some Filipinos and penal law to others. These practices appear in criminalization of lower-class Filipinos and their “culture,” illegal demolitions and forced relocations in urban poor neighborhoods, and the reproduction of poverty through penal law.

Author

• Christopher Magno, Gannon University