Education as Rhetoric of Colonization

I've had some time to think about the material that Bernadette presented last class and what really resonated with me was her point about how white Americans justified their colonization of the Philippines because their rule would be better than Spanish rule. The imagery of America being the responsible parent who had to discipline and take care of their unruly child, the Philippines, was a very important tactic used by Americans to justify their presence in the Philippines. I think this type of rhetoric has been common historically in colonizers. I want to draw a connection to some imagery from the slave era in the United States. Pro-slavery propaganda often utilized this theme of the caring plantation master who could provide a better life for the slave. The image below is an example of artwork that would have been used to push the pro-slavery agenda.

The piece shows a noble white plantation owners with their child living in harmony with their slaves. The inscription says something along the lines of how great slavery is because the slave owners were benevolent people who would do anything to ensure the well-being of their slaves. Like the Americans who wished to educate and civilize the Filipino people, pro-slavery advocates also wanted to project the image that they could do good for their people they were colonizing and forcing into slavery. 

Obviously the reality of both situations, the American take-over of the Philippines and slavery in the South, was vastly different from what the colonizers wanted to portray, but I think Bernadette's point of how powerful images are is relevant here. If one was uninformed about the brutality and dehumanizing reality of slavery (which a lot of people were during slavery, especially in the North), the image above would seem to make sense and slavery would not seem to be that bad. Everyone in the painting looks like they are enjoying themselves, so what would one object to? The relevance here is Bernadette's point about how Crone and the American officials were the ones who were responsible for the image of the Philippines America saw. They were the ones who sent the reports on their progress there and who keep all of this photographic evidence to show that the Filipino people were able to be civilized.

The last point I wanted to bring up is the similarity between the images of school children and portraits of the Filipino people in Western wardrobe with those of Native and Indigenous people who were colonized by Europeans. NPR and Racialicious wrote great pieces on Native American boarding schools, which was essentially a way to "Americanize" and assimilate Natives into Western culture. The point of the schools was to remove any sense of Native culture from children so that they could no longer relate to their ancestry. An image from the article I linked draws strong parallels to the "before" and "after" portraits of Filipino people in Crone's albums.

These boarding schools were happening at basically the same time frame America colonized the Filipines, in the early 20th century. Here we can see the "after" portrait as starkly similar to the "after" shots from Crone's albums comparing the "uncivilized" Native to the civilized one in a Western style coat and tie. The hair is groomed and short, combed in a way white people would find respectable.

Anyway, this was a really long post on what I took away from Bernadette's awesome presentation. I think the overall point of this post is that education is a vastly important weapon used by colonizers. Crone definitely knew this, which is why he reformed the educational system in the Philippines. Education is an institution that is widely seen as liberating, important, and necessary to success. Looking at the rhetoric of colonizers as pertaining to education, we can see how colonizers have used this positive idea of education in order to effectively colonize and conquer minority groups.