The Underclass Myth and Taking Our Rightful Place at the Foot of the Table

By Dr. Jordan J. Ryan (Cruz)

"I

thought that Filipinos couldn’t be professors here.”

It was my first week as a full-time college educator. Less than two months out of my PhD, I was nervous and excited to be teaching at Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts college. Excited to impact the lives of students, but nervous because I was green, and freshly arrived in the United States from Canada. My introductory New Testament class had just let out, so the room was empty except for one student who stood before me. His skin was brown like mine.

“What, at Wheaton?” I asked, with a wry smile. I thought I knew where this was going.

“No. In America.”

I felt his words run through me like electricity, shocking me, striking deep. Years later, they still reverberate through me.

I got to know that student better over the course of the year. He had never seen a Filipino person like him or like me in an academic role in the US. It was even more surprising to him that I was in the role of someone who taught the Bible, a position usually filled by white westerners, both in the US diaspora and the Philippines.

That short conversation continues to compel me to reflect deeply on my own experiences in academic biblical studies, theological education, and higher education in general. Filipinos are the third largest Asian American ethnic group, after Chinese Americans and Indian Americans. However, all my life, and especially since moving to the US, I have encountered the idea that Filipinos are a small, insignificant people group in North America. We are also the most statistically Christian Asian ethnic group, with 89% of Filipino Americans identifying as Christian. This means that Filipino Americans have a vested interest in reading and interpreting the Bible. However, I only know of one other New Testament scholar of Filipino heritage in the US, and both of us are mixed. While Filipino Americans have a place in the Kingdom of God, we have not been welcome at the table of theological education.

The Philippines is by far and away the most Christian nation in Asia, and one of the most Christian nations in the world. Nevertheless, it continues to be a favored destination for proclamatory missionary efforts from the white American church. The white American church wants to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ to people like me, but they do not want to learn about Jesus from people like me.

The story of my student who did not think that Filipinos could be professors in the United States illuminates an overlooked issue within the Asian American collective about how different Asian Americans are racialized. As an Asian American academic, I am frequently asked to speak about the model minority myth. When this happens, I struggle to find things to say, because my own experience has been characterized by a very different stereotype. I call that stereotype the “underclass myth.” I contend that Filipinos are often racialized as a racial underclass, as third world and thus third-class members of US society, as servants who occupy positions in the service and care industry. This stereotype is driven by a number of factors, including such things as the collective memory of the American colonization of the Philippines, the subsequent display of Filipinos in a human zoo at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, the problem of widespread poverty in the Philippines, the widespread phenomenon of Filipinos in nursing careers in the US (itself a product of US colonialism), and the exploitation of overseas Filipino workers for cheap labor in the United States.

I do not deny that Filipinos in America face some elements of the model minority myth. However, speaking from a personal perspective, much of the racialization that I have experienced in my life and career has not been derived from the model minority myth. It has mostly been rooted in this underclass myth, an insidious stereotype that constantly leads me to question whether I belong in higher education, and one that helps to explain my own experiences of invisibility and exclusion.

The first time that I realized that the Church had failed me was when, at fifteen years old, my family was invited to lunch on a Sunday after service by a worship leader, who I had seen as a mentor, and his wife. Since I was a musician and rookie worship leader myself, my family believed that the invitation extended out of that mentor-mentee relationship. We quickly discovered that the purpose of the invitation was for this couple to ask my mother if any of her sisters could serve as a nanny to their children. It was deeply wounding for my family, and led me to realize that we were being racialized in a way that was deeply harmful, but that I did not fully yet understand. Later in life, I remember driving on the highway between Hamilton and Toronto, and hearing a popular radio talk show host joking about how he was trying to find a nanny for his children and exclaiming that he needed a Filipino, because Filipinos were an entire race made to look after other peoples’ children. The more that I traveled in Europe in the United States, the more I began to notice the visibility of Filipinos in the service and care industries, and I started to better understand this element of how diaspora Filipinos are racialized.

It was in early 2020, right before the pandemic, that I truly processed what I had seen and experienced. I had been invited to give a lecture at the University of Oslo. It was a wonderful experience for which I am grateful. I had some time to explore Oslo on my own, and very glad for the opportunity. Many Chicago and Toronto winters had prepared me for the Norwegian cold. What I was not prepared for was the sight of so many people who looked like me in the city. Filipino overseas workers occupied almost every service industry job. Everywhere I looked, I saw kababayans serving white Europeans. I saw how they were exploited and practically invisible to those that they served.

I went back to my hotel room and wept bitterly because my people are not free.

In the eyes of our white American brothers and sisters, the work that our kababayans do in the service and care industries is mostly invisible. When it is seen, it is regarded mostly with a certain amount of classism and contributes to the racialization of Filipinos as servile. In the words of Barbara Jane Reyes’ poem, Brown Girl Glossary of Terms, “They need you to clean their houses and raise their babies. They don’t even pay you minimum wage to change their elders’ adult diapers.”

Through Filipino and Filipino American Christian eyes, our OFWs as selfless heroes, who spend so much time away from their families and who give so much of themselves to perform jobs that are considered undesirable by Westerners to provide for their loved ones back home. There is something Christlike about that level of sacrifice, a kenotic emptying of self for the sake of others. This, I think, is partly why so many of the most beloved Filipino movies deal with the experiences of overseas Filipino workers. In fact, the highest grossing Filipino movie of all time, Hello, Love, Goodbye, tells the story of a Filipino nanny in Hong Kong. My own Lola (grandmother) worked as a cleaning lady in Canada, and sent so much of the small amount of money that she earned home to the Philippines. She found solace in her favorite song, based on Matt 6:26, singing often to herself, “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.”

How can Filipino American followers of Jesus resist the underclass myth that keeps us exploited, racialized, stereotyped, and invisible in this country we call home? How can we, to borrow the terminology of some of the best theologians of our motherland, struggle against this iteration of white supremacy?

The cross and the tomb of Christ are the greatest acts of civil disobedience of all time. Together, they represent the struggle against the powers and principalities and the refusal to accept the death that the empire had ordered. These symbols of shame and death are foolishness to the world, but to we who are called, they are the very power of God at work in the world. We who are on the margins will suffer the pains of marginalization. We will know and be reminded time and again what it is like to not be seen. We will know and be reminded time and again what it is like to be made to feel as though we do not belong. Yet, the most powerful critiques of power in the biblical tradition come not from the center but from the margins. If we will suffer the stings of racism, colonialism, and white supremacy, let us not suffer passively, but like our crucified king, let us resist in the midst of suffering. Let us struggle, and let us do so in the hope that the empty tomb proclaims.

We are citizens of an upside-down Kingdom. The fact that we are racialized as an underclass and rendered invisible in US society indicates to us that while we might be considered among the least in the American empire, the last shall be first and first shall be last. God’s reign turns the world on its head, so that the weak shame the strong, the foolish shame the wise, and the powerful are torn down from their thrones while the Lord uplifts the lowly.

It is high time that we took our seats at the foot of the table. After all, we follow a king who sees those who sit at the foot of the table and makes room for us (cf. Luke 14:10). Yes, but I refuse to take that seat quietly, as though our goal was to become model minorities instead of an underclass, as though we could ever hope to graduate to honorary East Asian status. No, we do so with the same loob in us that was in Christ who was crucified, with the heart of struggle against the powers and principalities. So as we take our seats, we cry out:

Isang bagsak!

Photo by Krisia Vinzon from Pexels

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Dr. Jordan J. Ryan (Cruz) 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.