Chapter XXII: Appendix: D

RIZAL’S VIEWS ON THE RACE PROBLEM

From an Article on Rizal in the “International Archiv für Ethnographie,” by Ferdinand Blumentritt, in part translated and abridged by R. L. Packard in the “Popular Science Monthly,” July, 1902.

Rizal devoted himself particularly to the analysis of the sentiments with which the white and the colored races mutually regard each other. No one was so well qualified as he to study this question, which is of such importance to folk-psychology, for he was of himself of a colored race, had lived among his fellow-countrymen at his own home as well as among the whites, those of mixed bloods, and other classes at Manila, and had besides come to know Hong-Kong, Japan, Europe, and the United States and that in a thorough way and not as a mere tourist. His extensive acquaintance with languages opened for him the ethnological writings of all civilized nations, and his penetrating intellect prevented him from remaining content with the surface of things. It should be said, however, that Rizal concerned himself wholly with the relations between the white and the colored peoples of the Pacific because, as he explained, he knew nothing of the psychology of other colored races.

He said that as a boy he was deeply sensible that the Spaniards treated him with contemptuous disregard for the sole reason that he was a Filipino. From the moment when he discovered this attitude of theirs he endeavored to find out what right the Spaniards and the other whites generally had to look down upon people who think as they think, study the same things they study, and have the same mental capacity they possess, simply because these people have a brown skin and stiff, straight hair.

Europeans regard themselves as the sovereign masters of the earth, the only supporters of progress and culture and the sole legitimate species of the genus Homo sapiens, while they proclaim that all other races are inferior by refusing to acknowledge their capability of acquiring European culture, so that, according to the European view, the colored races are varieties of the genus Homo brutus. Rizal then asked himself, Are these views just? He began asking this question when he was a school-boy and at the same time began to answer it by observing his white fellow-students closely while he studied his own mental processes and emotions in order to make comparisons.

He soon remarked that in school, at least, no difference could be detected between the intellectual level of the whites and Filipinos. There were lazy and industrious, moral and immoral, dull and intelligent boys among the whites as well as among the Filipino scholars. Soon this study of race spurred him to exert himself to the utmost in his school studies, and a kind of race rivalry took possession of him. He was overjoyed whenever he succeeded in solving a difficult problem that baffled his white companions. But he did not regard these events as personal successes so much as triumphs of his own collective people. Thus it was in school that he first became convinced that whites go through the same intellectual operations as Filipinos and—ceteris paribus—progress in the same way and to the same extent. From this observation he came to the conclusion that whites and Filipinos have the same intellectual endowment.

In consequence of this conclusion there manifested itself in Rizal, as he himself avowed, a sort of national self-exaltation. He began to believe that the Tagalogs must stand higher intellectually than the Spaniards (the only whites he had known up to that time) and he used to like to tell how he came to this fallacious conclusion. In the first place, he said, in his school the whites received instruction in their own language while the Filipinos had to worry with strange idioms in order to receive instruction which was given in it alone. The Filipinos, therefore, must be better endowed intellectually than the Spaniards, he inferred, since they not only kept up with the Spaniards in their studies but even surpassed them, although handicapped by a different language. Still another observation caused him to disbelieve in the superiority of the European intelligence. He noticed that the Spaniards believed that the Filipinos looked up to them as beings of a superior nation and made of a finer clay than themselves. But Rizal knew very well that the respectfulness the Filipinos manifested toward the Spaniards did not proceed from self-depreciation but was simply dictated by fear and self-interest.

By fear because they saw in the Spaniard their lord and master who oppressed them arbitrarily even with good intentions; by self-interest because they had observed that his pride of race lays the European open to flattery and that they could get large concessions from him by a little subserviency. The Filipinos do not therefore have any real respect for the European but cringe and bow to him from interested motives alone. Behind his back they laugh at him, ridicule his presumption, and regard themselves as in reality the shrewder of the two races. Because the Spaniards never divined the real sentiment of the Filipinos toward themselves, young Rizal felt justified in regarding them as inferior in intelligence to his own countrymen. But in later years he found it necessary to change this false impression of his youth, especially as he had found by his own personal experience how easy it is to draw mistaken conclusions about people of a different race from one’s own. “Whenever,” he used to say, “I came upon condemnation of my people by Europeans either in conversation or in books I recalled these foolish ideas of my youth, my indignation cooled, and I could smile and quote the French proverb, ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’”

Dr. Rizal’s sojourn in Spain opened to him a new world. His intellectual horizon began to widen with his new experiences. New ideas thronged in upon him. He came from a land which was the very home of bigotry, where the Spanish friar, the Spanish official, and the Spanish soldier governed with absolute sway. But in Madrid he found the exact opposite of this repression. Free-thinkers and atheists spoke freely in disparaging terms of religion and the church; the authority of the Government he found to be at a minimum, while he not only saw Liberals contending with the Clerical Party but he beheld with astonishment Republicans and Carlists openly promoting the development of their political ideas.

Still greater was the influence upon him of his residence in France, Germany, and England. In those countries he enlarged his scientific information, or it would be better, perhaps, to say that there the spirit of modern philology was revealed to him and there he learned the meaning of the word “ethnology.”

The personal influence of the late Dr. Rost of London was most marked in the philological training of Dr. Rizal. His teachings and the study of the works of W. von Humboldt, Jacquet, and Professor H. Kern opened a new world for the Filipino scholar. He formed a plan to write a work upon the Tagalog verb, which he afterward modified, and while an exile in Dapitan in Mindanao he began to write a Tagalog grammar in English and at the same time prepared an essay upon the allied elements in the Tagalog and Visayan languages. The former work he intended to dedicate to Professor Kern, in the name of the Malay race; the latter he wished to inscribe to the memory of Dr. Rost. It was not granted to him to complete the manuscript of either, for he was interrupted in the midst of his work to be dragged about from tribunal to tribunal until his final sentence and death by public execution.

Fortunately, his work upon the transcription of Tagalog remains to us, a translation having appeared in the “Bijdragen” of the Indian Institute. Unfortunately, this work only increased the hatred of his political opponents, for the Spaniards were very much opposed to any independent work on the part of the Filipinos, being convinced that everything of the kind was merely a cloak for separatist views, and whatever was suspected of separatism in the Philippines was certain of meeting an unhappy fate.

Rizal, brought up among the Spaniards, was no better instructed than they themselves in modern ethnology, and, indeed, it was through Professor Blumentritt’s instrumentality that his attention was first directed to the defects in his education in that direction, whereupon he began with ardor to enlarge his knowledge in comparative ethnology. The works upon general ethnography by Perschel, F. Müller, Waitz, Gerland, and Ratzel, the ethnographical parallels of André, Wilkins’s work, the culture-historical publications of Lippert and Helwald became at once the subject of his industrious and thorough study, a study, furthermore, that not only enlarged his knowledge but afforded him the consolation of the assurance that his people were not an anthropoid race as the Spanish asserted, for he found that the faults and virtues of the Tagal are entirely human, and, moreover, he became convinced that the virtues and vices of any people are not mere peculiarities of a race but inherited qualities, qualities that become affected by climate and history.

At the same time he continued what he called his “course in practical ethnology”; that is to say, he studied the life of the French and German peasants, because he thought that a peasantry preserves national and race peculiarities longer than the other classes of a people, and also because he believed he ought to compare only the peasantry of Europe with his own countrymen, because the latter were nearly all peasants. With this object in view he withdrew for weeks to some quiet village where he observed closely the daily life of the country people.

He summed up the results of his scientific and “practical” studies in the following propositions:

1. The races of man differ in outward appearance and in the
structure of the skeleton but not in their physical qualities. The
same passions and pains affect the white, yellow, brown, and black
races; the same motives influence their actions, only the form in
which the emotions are expressed and the way the actions are
directed are different. Neither is this particular form of conduct
and expression constant with any race or people but varies under
the influence of the most diverse factors.

2. Races exist only for the anthropologists. For a student of the
customs of a people there are only social strata, and it is the
task of the ethnologist to separate and identify these strata. And
just as we mark out the lines of stratification in the mountain
ranges of a geological sketch so ought we to mark out the social
strata of the human race. And just as there are mountains whose
summits do not reach to the highest strata of the geological
system, so there are many people that do not reach the highest
social strata, while the lowest strata are common to all of them.
Even in the old established civilizations of France and Germany a
great proportion of the population forms a class which is upon the
same intellectual level with the majority of the Tagal, and is to
be distinguished from them only by the color of the skin, clothing,
and language. But while mountains do not grow higher, peoples do
gradually grow up into the higher strata of civilization, and this
growth does not depend upon the intellectual capacity alone of a
given people, but it is also due to some extent to good fortune and
to other factors, some of which can be explained and others not.

3. Since not only the statesmen who conduct colonial affairs but
scientific men as well maintain that there are races of limited
intelligence that could never attain the height of European
culture, the real explanation must be as follows: The higher
intelligence may be compared to wealth—there are rich and poor
peoples just as there are rich and poor individuals. The rich man
that believes he was born rich deceives himself. He came into the
world as poor and naked as his slave, but he inherits the wealth
that his parents earned. In the same way intelligence is inherited.
Races that formerly found themselves compelled by certain special
conditions to exercise their mental powers to an unusual extent
have naturally developed their intelligence to a higher degree than
others and they have bequeathed this intelligence to their
descendants, who in turn have increased it by further use.
Europeans are rich in intelligence but the present inhabitants of
Europe could not affirm without presumption that their ancestors
were just as rich in intelligence at the start as they themselves
are now. The Europeans have required centuries of strife and
effort, of fortunate conjunctions, of the necessary ability, of
advantageous laws, and of individual leading men to enable them to
bequeath their intellectual wealth to their present
representatives. The people that are so intelligent to-day have
become so through a long process of transmission and struggles.
History shows that the Romans thought no better of the Germans than
the Spaniards think of the Tagalog, and when Tacitus praises the
Germans he does so in the same style of philosophical idealizing
that we see in the followers of Rousseau, who thought that their
political ideal was realized in Tahaiti.

4. The condemnatory criticism of the Filipinos by the Spaniards is
easy to explain but appears not to be justified. Rizal demonstrated
this in the following way: Weaklings do not emigrate to foreign
lands but only men of energy that travel hence already prejudiced
against the colored races and reach their destination with the
conviction, which is usually sanctioned by law, that they are
called to rule the latter. If we remember, what few white men know,
that the Filipinos fear the brutality of the whites, it is easy to
explain why they make such a poor showing in works written by the
white while they themselves cannot reply in print. If we consider
further that the Filipinos with whom the whites had dealings
belong, for the most part, to the lower strata of society, the
opinions of them given by the whites have about the same value as
that of an educated Tagal would have who should travel to Europe
and judge all Germans and French by the dairy-maids, porters,
waiters, and cab-drivers he might meet.

5. The misfortune of the Filipinos is in the color of their skin
and in that alone. In Europe there are a great many persons that
have risen from the lowest dregs of the populace to the highest
offices and honors. Such people may be divided into two classes,
those that accommodate themselves to their new position without
pretensions and whose origin is consequently not imputed to them as
a disgrace, but on the contrary they are respected as self-made
men; and the conventional parvenus, who are ridiculed and detested
universally.

A Filipino would find himself ordinarily in the second of these two
classes no matter how noble his character or how perfect a
gentleman he might be in his manners and conduct, because his
origin is indelibly stamped upon his countenance, visible to all, a
mark that always carries with it painful humiliations for the
unfortunate native since it for ever exposes him to the prejudices
of the whites. Everything he does is minutely examined; a trifling
error in the toilet, which would be overlooked in a shoemaker’s son
that had acquired the title of baron, and might easily happen to a
pure-blooded descendant of the Montmorencys, in his case excites
amusement and you hear the remark: “What else do you expect? He is
only a native.” But even if he does not infringe any of the rules
of etiquette, and is besides an able lawyer or a skilful physician,
his accomplishments are not taken as a matter of course, but he is
regarded with a kind of good-natured surprise, a feeling much like
the astonishment with which one regards a well trained dog in a
circus, but never as a man of the same capabilities as a white man.

Another reason for the mean opinion in which the Filipinos have
been held by the whites is found in the circumstance that in the
tropics all the servants are colored. They have the defects of
their social class and of servants everywhere. Now, when a German
housewife complains of her servants, she does not extend their bad
qualities to the whole German nation; but this is done unblushingly
by Europeans that live in the tropics, and they never apparently
feel any compunctions but sleep the sleep of the just, undisturbed
by conscience.

The merchants also have contributed to the unfavorable judgment of
the Filipinos. Europeans come to the tropics in order to get rich
as soon as possible, which can only be done by buying from the
natives at astoundingly low rates. The latter, however, do not
regard this proceeding as a really commercial one, but they believe
that the whites are trying to cheat them; and they govern
themselves accordingly by trying, on their side, to overreach the
whites while their dealings with one another are far more
honorable. Consequently the Europeans call the natives liars and
cheats, while it never occurs to them that their own exploiting of
the ignorance of the natives is a conscienceless proceeding, or
rather they believe that, as whites, they are morally justified in
dealing immorally with the natives because the latter are colored.

Dr. Rizal finally came to think that he need no longer wonder at the prejudice of the whites against his people after he saw in Europe what unjustifiable prejudices European nations entertain against one another. He himself was always benevolent and moderate in his judgment of foreign peoples. His active and keen mind, his personal amiability, his politeness and manner as a man of the world, and his good and noble heart gained him friends everywhere, and, therefore, the tragic death of this intellectually distinguished and amiable man aroused general concern.

Rizal was an artist of delicate perceptions, a draftsman and sculptor as well as a scholar and ethnologist. Professor Blumentritt possesses three statues made by him of terra cotta which might aptly serve as symbols of his life. One represents Prometheus bound. The second represents the victory of death over life, and this scene is imagined with peculiar originality: a skeleton in a monk’s cowl bears in its arms the inanimate body of a young maiden. The third shows us a female form standing upon a death’s head and holding a torch in her high uplifted hands. This is the triumph of knowledge of the soul over death. Rizal, concludes Professor Blumentritt, was undoubtedly the most distinguished man not only of his own people but of the Malay race in general. His memory will never die in his fatherland.