Reaction Paper to "Hate Letter Against Filipinos"

“Filipinos…. *make me puke*” (“Hate letter against Filipinos”)
A Reaction Paper

A year ago or so, I received in my Yahoo inbox the hate letter against Filipinos which has been circulating in many online circles. As a Filipina, my instinctive thought after reading the letter against my race is loathing toward the writer. But my patriotism aside, I nevertheless see Mr. Art Bell’s hate letter as unfair and predisposed, and Mr. Bell, pathetically narrow-minded.

The first step in critical thinking is to know our attitudes and values. In “our,” let us consider both the writer’s and the readers’. Talking about values, every person naturally supports a group (i.e., a race) he belongs in. Mr. Bell was an American and therefore we could not expect him to support our country for he does not appear in whatever way related to it. At the same time, he is free to declare his opinions of any person, people, or country. That is a basic human right. On the other hand, we Filipinos value our country and its name and naturally have the attitude of safeguarding it. The tension breaks in the way Mr. Bell has bluntly stated his opinions about the Philippines. What’s even worse is his proliferation of his opinions to so many people (he’s a radio announcer) and his seeming claim to facts.

A statement is a fact if it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, based upon certain assumptions. An opinion is a statement that others may disagree with. Considering how many people shared this letter and reacted against it (not just Filipinos and half-Filipinos but even those who are entirely foreign), it is certainly something that many disagree with—an opinion.

Some of Mr. Art Bell’s claims might actually be factual, but his hate letter is still an opinion because it does not report a fact supported by any evidence or statistic (objective) but rather, base it solely on his observation and interpretation (subjective). His language is evidently subjective with the use of phrases “like some sort of disease”, “trashy kind of qualities, foul and disgusting”, “most horrible thing, trashy people”, “I believe that they would and do, I don’t believe anything good ever will [come from the Filipinos]”. These all manifested his emotion-driven judgment, which is a mile away from critical thinking, which entails objectivity.

In critical thinking, we also need to test the authority. The author of the hate letter was Mr. Art Bell, a radio talk show host in America. He has two shows broadcasted from his home in Nevada, which is rebroadcast by 400 stations across the country. He's written two books. He lived in Okinawa, Japan for some years and had a radio program on the English station there. And he has been to the Philippines (he's traveled fairly extensively around the world).

His hate letter presented subjects U.S., Asia (particularly Japan), and the Philippines. Let us assume he is competent and even possibly reliable for he was born and raised in the U.S., have traveled well (presumably around many countries in Asia), lived in Japan for some years, and has even been to the Philippines. However, he is apparently prejudiced both in his language and his tone. It is also interesting to note that his hate letter focused on the Filipinos he met and observed in the United States, whereas he never mentioned anything bad of Filipinos in the Philippines. In the end, he made the unjustifiable mistake of condemning all Filipinos.

How about the evidences? All of his claims were first-hand or those he himself observed. However, his big mistake was in generalizing. In the first paragraph, his first description of a Filipino is of those in the U.S. Armed Forces. He called Filipinos trashy without defining what trashy is. His claim that Filipinos have no right to call themselves Asians is ridiculous; the Philippines is part of Asia, has always been, and Filipinos, by birth or origin, will always be called Asians.

His prejudice showed in saying that nothing respectable has ever been created by Filipinos. If he researched, he’d find that one of the world’s celebrated wonders was created by the Ifugaos. The fluorescent lamp was invented by Agapito Flores, a Filipino. There are more if he only tried to find them. It seemed that his repugnance of our race is concentrated on the young Filipino men in America who engage in import racing and in the “Asian IRC Rings”. It can never be called critical thinking when one judges a race simply by knowing a very small percentage of them.