No Model Minority, Part II: Filipino Americans, the Bible, and Resisting Racism

In the church’s pursuit of justice, lessons from Filipino American history and experience can helpfully shape our approach to the Scriptures.

By Dr. Jordan Ryan

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n part one of this two-part series, I discussed the experience of invisibility that Filipino Americans face, in the church, the academy, and North America. Despite this, I believe that there is much that other Asian Americans can learn from Pinoy and Pinay followers of Jesus, since there is much that Pinoy and Pinay followers of Jesus bring to the contextual theological study of Scripture. Here, I will identify two more things that Filipino Americans carry from our history and context that can shape our reading of Scripture: a hermeneutic of collective resistance and the cultural values of community and family.

A Hermeneutic of Collective Resistance

The history of Filipinos and the United States is marked by collective resistance—striving together as a community for justice in the bayanihan spirit. We engaged in resistance to the United States against colonization and the racial extermination of over one million Filipinos during the American invasion and subsequent pacification of 1899-1913. We’ve also engaged in resistance in the United States through fighting for the rights of workers and immigrants. 

We Filipino Americans have had our prophets and judges: novelist and poet Carlos Bulosan, labor organizer Larry Itliong, and many more witnesses have gone before us. From the grape fields of California to the canneries of Alaska, from the warehouses of Hawaii to the packing houses of Chicago, Filipino Americans have historically organized and resisted through activism. There has also been resistance in the United States to the anti-Filipino racism exemplified by the Watsonville riots of 1930, when white residents beat Filipinos and destroyed their neighborhood. We’ve resisted with the United States against the Japanese occupation and its evils, which many of our lolas and lolos lived through. We’ve resisted against broken American promises, including protests when Filipino WWII USAFFE veterans were denied (and continue to be denied) the benefits promised them. These veterans, these witnesses, who have continued to march in protest into the final years of their lives, teach us how to resist. Our resistance has been against the Marcos regime (1966-1986) and the American foreign policy that enabled it, in the form of the peaceful People Power Revolution. 

Now, we practice resistance again in the United States as we suffer anti-Asian racism and link arms in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters. And as Black American Christian activists joined in solidarity with the Filipino and Chinese community activists at the International Hotel in 1968, so too do I hope that Filipinos and other Asian Americans will stand in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters today.

In 2020, this history of resistance was remembered when “The History of Filipino American Activism” was designated as the theme of Filipino American History Month. It was a timely reminder: If we decide to be complacent in this moment—in an attempt to be accepted as “true” Americans by our white American brothers and sisters—we risk forsaking the legacy of the cloud of witnesses who went before us.

The rest of Asian America has something to learn from this history of Filipinos who resisted colonization, fought against injustice, and successfully threw off oppressors in the past. We are no model minority. In fact, America has really never regarded us as a true model minority, at least not in the same way as our East Asian brothers and sisters. Rather than the model minority myth, in my experience, the stereotype that Filipinos most frequently face is that we are members of an underclass.

So, if Filipino Americans are not a model minority, what are we? To quote portions of the essay “Freedom from Want” by one of our Filipino American prophets, Carlos Bulosan:

Everywhere we are on the march. We are bleeding where clubs are smashing heads, where bayonets are gleaming. We are fighting where the bullet is crashing upon armorless citizens, where the tear gas is choking unprotected children. Under the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs. Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit. Where the honest man is hanged because he told the truth. But our march to freedom is not complete unless want is annihilated. If you want to know what we are—we are marching!

We are still marching. Justice is wanting, and so we march on together. Individualism is not our way, and we cannot annihilate our want for justice in isolation. Confronting racism requires collective resistance of our community, the barangay together. 

This communal spirit is shared by many of our Asian American brothers and sisters, and it is something that we can bring to our churches and the nation. The freedom from want that Bulosan wrote of is possible through the story of the koinonia, or fellowship, of the Jerusalem church. As Luke tells us, “There was not a needy person among them” (Acts 4:34, ESV). The koinonia that Luke describes reminds us that the church together, empowered by the Holy Spirit and founded on Jesus and his teachings, can work to annihilate want. It has done it before.

When Mary proclaims that her soul magnifies the Lord, who has, through the child in her womb “pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52, CEB), a people who have struggled recognize this for the prophetic image that it is and can live into the faithfully subversive reality that it envisions. When Jesus proclaims in Luke 4:18-19 that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, and liberation for the oppressed, Filipino Americans take solace in the fact that we struggle alongside our Lord in that proclamation and in its realization here on earth. When that same Jesus is crucified, we understand the pain of his struggle and sacrifice. In his act of self-sacrificial love (John 15:13), we see the faces of Filipino healthcare workers who have given their lives on the frontlines of this pandemic. In the injustice of his death at the hands of the colonizers, we remember José Rizal, Gabriela Silang, and countless others whose lives were unjustly taken. 

In the resurrection of Jesus, we see the greatest act of civil disobedience in human history: the colonial authorities wanted him dead, but he refused, overcame, and triumphed.

If we hope to confront racism, we have to resist it. Those who stand to benefit from systemic racism in the church will say that resistance is not biblical, that it is necessarily violent, that Jesus was a pacifist, and that Paul tells us to respect the authorities. But when they do, we should remember our history and remember that we serve a Lord who flipped tables, proclaimed liberation for the oppressed, and who died on the colonizer’s cross but refused to stay dead. And he did it all without the sword. Jesus, John the Baptist, Peter, and Paul were all arrested and executed, but we are to stay home and not exercise our law-abiding right to speak out peacefully against racial injustice? 

We serve a king who raised not the sword but himself on a cross. This resistance is a peaceful resistance. Rather than the bolo or the kris, we raise the symbol of our peaceful revolution: the crucified King. That same symbol has served the Filipino people before. May it serve us again now as we confront the injustices of our day.

Bayanihan and Koinonia 

Filipino and Filipino American culture is community and family oriented. This bayanihan spirit is our strength. Family is everything. At a time when some of our White Christian brothers and sisters tell us that our emphasis on community is “cultural Marxism”—which has happened before—we Asian Americans should refuse all the more to give in to an individualistic reading of Scripture and salvation. 

When we read about the koinonia in Acts 4–6, we see the Christian community sharing all they had in common, so there was no poverty among them. The vulnerable were cared for and looked after, just as we look after our honored lolas and titas, lolos and titos. (The community was of one mind until ethno-cultural discrimination broke it down, and Hebrews received preferential treatment over the Hellenists.) Filipino Americans recognize the bayanihan spirit in the biblical Jerusalem church at its best, and our own bayanihan spirit can be a gift to the Asian American church today.

In light of that bayanihan spirit, the spirit of the koinonia, I refuse to abandon the White church that colonized and killed our ancestors and that continues to deny us justice, because I know that Christ has not abandoned it. Instead, I will proclaim Good News to it: good news to the poor, freedom for the captives, sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed, and jubilee. I believe that we people of color in the church are now called to that mission field. But let us not wait any longer, for the harvest is plenty but the workers are few.

To read part I: No Model Minority, Part I: Invisible Asian Americans in the Midst of a Season of Apocalypse

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

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Dr. Jordan Ryan is a half-Filipino New Testament scholar, hailing from the multicultural city of Toronto, Canada. His parents worked with the street youth population in the inner city, and he grew up in the heart of the city in community with some of its most marginalized people. He is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, IL, where he teaches courses in biblical studies and in archaeology.