"A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share our racial origin."
"A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share our racial origin."
According to the 2017 Pew Research Poll’s Views on China, 40 percent of Filipinos have an unfavorable view.
I am also seeing a lot of negative posts or sentiments on social media on the growing number of Chinese tourists, workers, and investors.
A sentiment against China, its people, overseas Chinese, or Chinese culture is called Sinophobia. It often targets Chinese minorities living outside of China and is complicated by the dilemma of immigration, the development of national identity in neighboring countries, the disparity of wealth, the fall of the past central tribute system, and majority-minority relations. Factors contributing to Sinophobia include the disapproval of the Chinese government, historical grievances, fear of economic competition, and plain and simple racism.
Sinophobia also stems from older ethnic tensions, such as those related to Japanese nationalism, Korean nationalism, Indian nationalism, Vietnamese nationalism, and, of course, Filipino nationalism and our long Western colonial history.
The Chinese were once known as the Yellow Peril—a racist color-metaphor that is integral to the xenophobic theory of colonialism: that the people of China are a danger to the Western world. As a psycho-cultural perception of menace from the East, fear of the Yellow Peril was more racial than national, a fear derived, not from concern with a specific source of danger, from any one country or people, but from a vaguely ominous, existential fear of the vast, faceless, nameless horde of yellow people opposite the Western world. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror is the fear of the rising tide of colored people from the Orient.
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social, or political significance to a person’s genetic lineage—the notion that a person’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a person is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a person’s mind (not his ability to think, understand, or learn, but his mind’s content) is inherited; that a person’s convictions, values, and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for prehistoric brutes. It is the early village and farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and human beings.
Racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes a person from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of a person’s life: Reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of a person’s character that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem.
Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. That’s what the 40 percent are doing. The irony is the notion that one’s culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one’s ancestors, is regarded as aggressive nationalism or patriotism if claimed by a majority—but as “ethnic” or Filipino pride if claimed by a minority. Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority—but retrogression to a pre-Spanish village, to an American Indian tepee, or to the tropical rainforest is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.
We must be reminded that, Filipino or Chinese, a genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share our racial origin.
eric.jurado@gmail.com