Pinoy Pride is a force to be reckoned with on the internet. Filipinos swarm the internet each time a beauty queen with a modicum of Filipino heritage gets crowned at a pageant, or when an obscure Hollywood starlet claims they love and grew up eating adobo. No matter how tangential the Filipino connection is, you can count on millions of our netizens to shower such news stories or social media posts with likes and shares.
Content creators have certainly caught on to this trend. You need only refer to the tons of YouTube “reaction videos” devoted to commenting on specific aspects of our culture. YouTubers reacting to karaoke singers from the Philippines is an entire genre unto itself, with hundreds of videos just on that specific topic.
Time and time again, these creators commoditize Pinoy pride and our collective thirst for global validation. Enter Pinoy-baiting: when foreign content creators “bait” us with even the most mundane Filipino elements in an attempt to gain likes, shares, and engagement. These creators ooh and aah over our karaoke singers, celebrities, beaches, and Jollibee, and we fall for it each time like chum thrown out to sea.
One of the worst examples of this phenomenon we’ve seen happened last year when Arab–Israeli vlogger Nuseir Yassin, known to the internet as Nas Daily, drew flak for offering a Nas Daily Academy workshop on the “Ancient Art of Tattooing” featuring 104-year-old tattoo artist and national treasure Whang-Od, a member of the indigenous Butbut tribe of Kalinga in the Cordillera region. The problem is that Nas did not go through the proper channels to secure her consent, including getting the permission of the rest of the members of the tribe and coordinating with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples.
While Nas Daily Academy took the workshop down on its website, Nas himself insisted that he sought Whang-Od’s permission and posted an out-of-context, 22-second video of the tattoo artist affixing her thumbprint to a contract — a claim Whang-Od’s grandniece refuted, saying that the tatooist did not understand the agreement they had made.
It’s a rather extreme example of the overarching idea of Pinoy-baiting: as a foreigner, Nas stood to profit off an intangible part of Filipino heritage while having little actual respect for the culture.
Despite the uproar over that incident, we continue to see Pinoy-baiting to varying degrees: A number of recent Netflix shows feature Filipino elements that seemed designed just to draw us in — from the character on Money Heist codenamed Manila (who isn’t Filipino) and that Imelda Marcos quip made by Helena Bonham-Carter as Princess Anne in The Crown, to Vanessa Hudgens’ character Stacy randomly exclaiming, “I’m Filipino!” on The Princess Switch, three movies in.
Filipinos are not entirely to blame for how easily we take this bait. It’s a residual aspect of colonialist mentality that stems from years, centuries even, of being othered on our own shores. Our Spanish colonizers dubbed our native ancestors as indio, the uneducated hicks and the lowest rung of the ladder, while the Americans were more backhanded in labeling Filipinos their “little brown brothers.”
Fast forward to today, where millions of Filipinos who are desperate to leave the country for a better life are vulnerable to exploitation and being treated as second-class citizens abroad.
So when Filipinos, having internalized an inferiority complex for generations, get praised about something that hits close to home, we’re quick to jump on the bandwagon and brandish the Filipino flag.
It’s why we’re proud to claim any form of international representation, even potentially problematic ones such as comedian Jo Koy mining laughs by imitating his mother, a first-generation Filipino immigrant to the United States, in the stand-up material that provided him with his Hollywood breakout. While his personal experiences as a Filipino-American are valid, the depth of representation he claims to stand for merits some nuanced consideration and critique.
So is Pinoy Pride a bad thing?
Don’t get us wrong: Pinoy pride is not harmful in and of itself. Being proud of our country’s wealth of natural resources and talents is something that we are all entitled to. And when we’re proud of what we have and have created as a people, we foster a culture of support and patronization that leads to collective progress and prosperity. After all, when we shop and support local, we help homegrown businesses and talent thrive — and that’s always a good thing.
Yet Pinoy pride can take a toxic turn when we’re only proud when there’s international validation. We’re so quick to share reaction videos by foreigners to Jollibee or ube as if we need them to tell us our food is great. It’s the same mentality at play when an ignorant backpacker or a white journalist claims that our food is the “blandest” in the region, earning our collective ire. It’s time we ask ourselves: why is their rebuke of our heritage so important to us?
By being more self-assured in the traditions and parts of our heritage that form our identity, we can strengthen Pinoy pride intrinsically, without it being shaped by the opinions of outsiders from our culture. And by having that confidence in our own culture, we become less vulnerable to foreigners looking to exploit Pinoy pride for profit.
Maybe then we can be a little more judicious about clicking on that next reaction video.
