Filipino American college students at the margins of neoliberalism

Under-represented students and the ideological shift of neoliberalism

Multiple scholars have characterized the current social, economic, and political landscape of American public policy as focusing on a neoliberal ideology (Giroux, 2014; Harvey, 2005; Ong, 2006). Whereas the traditional liberal perspective aspires to use public policy and government intervention as a means to uphold equality among the citizenry, the neoliberal ideology aims to reduce government control and emphasize the economically driven decisions of individuals. The “neo” aspect of neoliberalism thus borrows from the conservative ideology of reduced government control and free market capitalism as means to pursue traditionally liberal ends. The emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s was an institutional response to shifting perspectives of America through both foreign and domestic lenses. As traditional liberal public policies sought to provide social services and civil liberties to previously disenfranchised and socially marginalized groups (people of color, women, LGBT, persons with disabilities, etc.), conservative backlash mounted against these measures, characterized by calls for increased levels of accountability for public sector spending and fear of “reverse discrimination” against traditionally privileged groups. The end result has been a new system of “relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality” (Ong, 2006: 3). Appealing to a “common sense” rhetoric, neoliberalism has ushered in an age where “the language of the market and business culture have now almost entirely supplanted any celebration of the public good” (Giroux, 2014: 8). Liberal policies in higher education, such as affirmative action, interdisciplinary studies, and minority student affairs are hence critiqued and curtailed under the supposedly universal criteria of controlling government spending (portrayed to the individual as the equal use of her/his tax and tuition dollars without differential treatment for specific groups) and academic excellence (the fair chance for an individual’s academic qualifications to retain social/human capital by not admitting supposedly undeserving students into higher education).

Throughout the 1980s, educational policies that reduced needs-based financial aid to low-income students and raised tuition at rates far eclipsing national income began to dictate that higher education was a private good that should be financed by individuals rather than the public. The exorbitant financial costs of higher education shifted the expectations of students and their communities from one of constituents seeking political and moral accountability (the ability to be included in the “public” of public education) to one of consumers seeking capitalistic returns on their investments into the higher education system (Bowen and Bok, 2000; Giroux, 2014). According to the free market principles of neoliberalism, students who are qualified and motivated enough to attain higher education should be able to find their own opportunities. Conversely, those who do not attain higher education are the product of their own inability to achieve, for all types of students presumably have equal opportunities to succeed. Liberal considerations of the Civil Rights Era that viewed higher education as a means of upward mobility for under-privileged and systematically excluded communities were taken off the table. The benefits of including such students within a higher education landscape became reduced to a color-blind notion of “diversity” that was rooted in academic excellence and the abstract exchange of ideas, thus presuming that legacies of racism and injustice had been eradicated and were no longer relevant to educational access and attainment. The most prevalent example of the ideological shifts of neoliberal diversity is the policy of affirmative action. Once established as a means to remedy the historical and contemporary effects of racial discrimination in college admissions, affirmative action has been revised through United States Supreme Court cases to simply reflect a “compelling state interest” in diverse higher education environments. This contemporary emphasis on diversity makes no mention of prior institutionalized discrimination on behalf of the state and its continued residual effects. Rather, it counter-intuitively ignores lingering social stratification that forms the foundation for diverse worldviews and attributes student diversity to natural variance along various demographics with no systematic analysis of these differences or their impact on educational access and attainment.

The modern rhetoric of diversity in higher education emphasizes student demographics, such as socioeconomic status, religion, and ability in addition to and on equal footing with race and ethnicity as factors of individual and institutional diversity (Urciuoli, 2010). Yet in spite of the growing attempts to dismiss race as irrelevant, disparities in educational outcomes continue to persist along racial lines. African American and Latino students are much more likely to be perceived as antagonistic and punished severely, particularly for minor infractions (Ochoa, 2013; Schofield, 2009). Diversity in higher education is not increasing relative to the population of qualified students (Chang et al., 2003), and residential segregation is leading to increased segregation in K-12 schools as well (Bonilla-Silva, 2009). Even when equal educational qualifications are accounted for, African Americans and Latinos are still underemployed and underpaid relative to Whites (Grant and Sleeter, 2009). These continuing disparities reflect the notion that “race is a master category—a fundamental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States” (Omi and Winant, 2014: 106). Omi and Winant’s seminal theory on racial formation—or the historical process by which identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed (p. 109) is based on the fundamental assumption that race is a fixed, objective social fact that cannot be reduced to notions of ethnicity, class, or nationhood. As they state, “race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has influenced the definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of resources, and the ideologies and practices of subordination and suppression” (p. 107). To that end, the individual and institutional inequalities highlighted above are some of the innumerable examples of how the American education system continues to serve as an integral tool in reinforcing socially stratified racial categories, thus perpetuating the uneven distribution of rights and resources in spite of seemingly equal opportunity.

However, when faced with these harsh realities, institutions of higher education rely on the self-fulfilling prophecy of neoliberal diversity—by claiming to embrace diversity and eradicating explicitly discriminatory policies, universities create a façade that deflects future claims of wrong-doing or inadequacy. As Ahmed (2012) describes:

What is created by the description of the university as diverse might be the very idea of a university as being diverse, which as an idea then circulates within the community that is being described. The “diverse university” becomes a shared object, if others within the university repeat the description the repetition of utterance gives it force … The circulation of the word “diversity” creates the very idea of “the diverse institution” and in turn, this idea gives the word “diversity” its circulability. (Ahmed, 2012: 56)

Historical genealogy of the Filipino American identity

As neoliberal policies in higher education attempt to transform minority difference into an objective marker of social difference, the Filipino American student identity defies the oversimplified logic of the abstract racial categorization of students and the reduction of educational attainment to measures of individualistic educational outcomes. The Filipino American identity has been formed in constant dialogue with both Asian America and the United States as a whole, thus creating a unique demographic group that has constantly blurred the lines of racial and ethnic categorization. As an archipelago with inhabitants of various ethnic origins that held no singular, collective identity until it was colonized (and hence culturally influenced) by Spain and the United States, the Philippines does not concisely fit into the mythical concept of Asia as a monolithic area of ethnic ancestry. Conversely, the physical marking of Filipino people as non-White persons within a United States racial landscape categorically excludes them from full inclusion as Americans. Throughout the course of American history, Filipino Americans have been neither Asian nor American, occupying various intermediary identities on the spectrum between these two polar opposites. Within the current neoliberal boundaries of American higher education, this fluid Filipino American identity exhibits possibilities for resisting neoliberal ideals through collective resistance to antiquated schemas that narrowly associate educational success of minority students with cultural temperaments and dismiss the heavily segregated nature of campus environments and educational access.

The first waves of Filipino American immigration began shortly after American colonization of the Philippines in 1898. This particular time period is notable in the overall Asian American historical narrative, as immigration from China had recently been banned as a result of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the exclusion of Japanese immigration would soon follow with the 1904 Gentleman’s Agreement. These restrictions on the two largest immigration streams from Asian countries were the result of growing social unrest from Whites who vilified the “Yellow Peril” of Asian immigrants as criminal deviants who were inassimilable to American culture and created competition with Whites for working class jobs (Okihiro, 1994). Although Filipino Americans were not subject to the same exclusionary laws as their Asian counterparts, they were not afforded the full rights and privileges of being American, either. In addition to interpersonal discrimination and violence, Filipinos also became subject to the same anti-miscegenation and anti-citizenship laws that initially only applied to “Chinese,” “Asiatics,” or “Mongolians” (Chuh, 2003). Their identity on the one hand as non-White “Malays” from Asia and as “US nationals” from an overseas colony on the other thus created a contradictory space that valued the Philippines as a colonial territory in Southeast Asia, but devalued the presence of Filipino Americans within the domestic sphere. Espiritu (2003) refers to these processes as “differential inclusion”:

I define differential inclusion as the process whereby a group of people is deemed integral to the nation’s economy, culture, identity, and power—but integral only or precisely because of their designated subordinate standing … I use the term inclusion to underscore that Filipinos, and similarly racialized groups, have always been inside of and played absolutely crucial roles in the building and sustaining of the nation … In so doing, I wish to show that the process of differential inclusion is intimately connected to the “possessive investment in Whiteness.” (Espiritu, 2003: 47–48, emphasis in original)

Despite the pensionado program ending in the mid-1910s and the United States granting the Philippines its full independence in 1946, the effects of American colonialism are still readily apparent in the Philippine education system and its culture as a whole. English is one of the country’s official languages, used as a primary language of instruction in schools as well as in government affairs. In 2011, the Philippines Department of Education adopted a compulsory K-12 educational system, adding two more years onto its pre-existing system in order to make Filipino graduates more marketable to educational and professional opportunities outside the country (De Los Reyes, 2013). To that end, the prestige of colleges in the Philippines is evaluated heavily on an institution’s ability to make graduates marketable for jobs abroad, where people are often able to make more money underemployed in the service sector than they would in their respective professional fields in the Philippines (Parreñas, 2001, 2011).

Just as these educational policies shape the cultural landscape of the young Republic of the Philippines, so too do they continue to shape and influence the growing Philippine diaspora, the majority of which is only one generation or less removed from the Philippines. In the United States, the ways that the Filipino American identity has been shaped and re-shaped by American public policies provides great insight regarding the effects of post-1965 neoliberal policies on the lived experiences of college students. In an ironic twist, American neoliberal policy is now trying to homogenize and undervalue the very Filipino American identity that the American government once played a crucial role in differentiating and bolstering on a global stage to serve its own interests domestically and abroad. Thus, dissecting Filipino American experiences within higher education becomes a project that does not merely highlight difference for difference’s sake but also exposes the ways that the neoliberal system of higher education falls short of effectively managing these differences due to inherent shortcomings within the system that miscategorize students and fail to accurately capture the relationship between racial and ethnic identities, and educational achievement.

Filipino Americans in neoliberal higher education

As a result of the liberal accomplishments of the mid-20th century, Filipino American students have benefitted greatly from measures designed to foster educational access, retention, and attainment for under-represented minority students. But as the public education system has begun to lean more directly toward neoliberal ideologies and policies in the subsequent decades, Filipino American students find their needs and capabilities ignored, rendered invisible, and/or grossly mistranslated in lieu of structural constraints that refuse to acknowledge the complexities of their educational experiences. Differences in educational experiences and utilization of vital campus resources between Filipino Americans and both the Asian American majority and the predominantly White student population at most universities are seen as nothing more than individual deficiencies that need to be overcome through free will. In addition, the neoliberal ideology that stresses the individual liberties of citizens and the free market principles of achieving these liberties ignores the active role that public institutions play in deciding whose liberties are valued and who is given the opportunity to participate in the free market. Within the realm of higher education specifically, this means that colleges and universities are not merely passive receptacles of democratically determined public policies, but rather they are central hubs of activity that determine what identities are valued and how these identities are given value and primacy over others (Ferguson, 2012; Park, 2013). For Filipino American students, being subsumed under the institutional category of “Asian American” ignores their colonial linkages to the educational system and the differential experiences of Filipino Americans within the modern American racial landscape. Given this context of the modern neoliberal university, I explore how Filipino American students continue to defy the simplistic boundaries of educational policy as it deals with minority difference.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have used the case of Filipino Americans to highlight numerous flaws within two underlying, fundamental beliefs of the current theory and implementation of neoliberal policies: (1) individual, private citizens are mutually exclusive entities from the public structures that govern them at a macro level; and (2) race is a mere objective category of social difference that the university (and the education system as a whole) has no role in shaping or determining. The sociocultural designation of Asian Americans as “model minorities” is reflective of multiple tenets of neoliberal education policies that have deliberately sought to counteract the liberal progresses of the Civil Rights Era. In an attempt to demonstrate the irrelevance of race, the supposed success of Asian Americans was bolstered in contrast to the supposed failures of Black and Latino communities. The racism of model minority logic dictates that if Asian Americans are successful, it is due to their individual, cultural temperaments, which African Americans and Latinos allegedly do not possess. As such, any racial considerations are individual, private concerns and should not be addressed by public policies. However, the construct of an Asian American model minority, which disregards race as reflective of life chances or educational opportunities, is drastically complicated when the Filipino American identity is examined in relation to both the Asian American majority and the racial landscape of the United States as a whole. Ironically, it is this very identity that was created in large part by the United States’ conservative ideals (which would eventually spawn neoliberalism) that complicates and negates a neoliberal framework of racial and ethnic identity in higher education.

Filipino American experiences, both in and out of the American educational system, serve as a means to better understand the complex systems of marginalization and oppression that still permeate throughout our society. Whereas differing schools of thought, particularly those focused on the cause-and-effect relationships of policymaking, are often looking for the root cause of a certain problem or deficiency, an intersectional analysis of Filipino American students demonstrates that their needs and capabilities are not easily reducible to their racial and ethnic ancestry or perpetually foreign cultural difference. Across their various and often conflicting identities as children of immigrants, people of color, Asian Americans, Filipino Americans, and/or college students, Filipino American students’ hybrid identities cannot be summed up through one category of social difference or one check box on institutional data collections. The American educational experience throughout its various iterations has consistently created an arena where individual and collective identities are established, examined, and critiqued in ways that are unique to the specific material conditions that guide public education in the current historical moment. As the United States continues to diversify upon multiple axes of social, political, cultural, and economic difference, the field of education will continue to remain a vital component of the government’s institutional response to its various constituencies.

Moving forward, this research on the trajectory and experiences of Filipino American students in higher education is not merely a means to describe one population or demographic in depth. It is my hope that an intersectional analysis of the Filipino American experience will help to deconstruct false binaries that restrict our ways of thinking about education policy, research, advocacy, and pedagogy. While the case of Filipino Americans is unique, the method of incorporating histories of public policy, foreign relations, community building, socioeconomic development, and racial formation into discussions about the purpose and objectives of public education should continue to be placed in the center of the discussion, rather than the margins.