179 notes
10 / 4 / 2012 @ 16:49
(source: fuckvtec)

ulyber:

fuckvtec:

Always try so hard to show off on Facebook. Always taking pictures of food, checking in places, taking group pictures, posting cheezy shit with their girl/boyfriends. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing those things. I just find that 5-6 people fill up my entire news feed with these kind of…

Let me be the first to respond back to this in disagreement. Mr. Vtec, I can respect that this is your opinion, but I can’t respect the views of it—I find them ignorant. Honestly, I’m not sure how any kind of racist remark can’t be deemed ignorant, so please see the reasoning behind this statement.

First and foremost, it is impossible to announce that Filipinos are the “materialistic, try-hards of the Asians”. You use the example that Filipinos post absolutely everything they do all the time on social networking sites like Facebook. However, as Facebook is a social networking site, I’m sure that you can’t expect it to be used for much more things than that. If somebody decided to start posting everything they did in graffiti on some brick wall across your street, this could be judged unacceptable, but saying that a random Filipino posting what they did during their day on a site designed for “sharing information, ideas, personal messages, and other content” (definition of social media as defined by merriam-webster), would be the same as saying that it is inappropriate to use the toilet to pee in. Or, to be more specific for this situation, to pee in a larger amount of times than what you would judge “acceptable”. 

This brings me to my second point. It is a fact that over a million people are signed up on Facebook. I can also almost call it a fact, that if I looked on my Facebook right now, I’d probably find a friend of mine posting something about the food they just ate. However, can I also call it a fact that 100% of the time, this friend that I mentioned is going to be Filipino? Absolutely not. Can I even say that it’s going to be a Filipino a majority of the time? Nope. That is unless most of my friends are Filipino. Then in that case, we have to go through statistics and probability. I don’t think I need to reiterate the point that millions of people are on Facebook and these millions of people use the site for what it’s supposed to be used for—social media. Not everyone is Filipino (unfortunately, joke, ha). And if you put microblogging social media sites in to the picture, I’m sure you’ll see even more people post random happenings of their day, who also happen to not be Filipino. The reason you probably think everyone posting random stuff on your News Feed is Filipino is probably because of the psychological phenomenon called “perceptual vigilance”. For example, you start thinking about pizza while you’re driving, and all of a sudden there are way more pizza delivery drivers than you ever could’ve imagined. 

Now in terms of being proud, I can say that there are some Filipinos out there that are “too proud”—Filipinos who forget that they do live in the United States and that this country has provided a lot for them. However can we say that a majority of Filipinos act this way? Through your examples, I have to say no. Just because we hang a Filipino flag or other gear representing our heritage and culture does not mean we are “too proud” or forget that we live in the U.S. (/elsewhere). It simply means that we enjoy being Filipino. When a Mexican hangs a Mexican flag inside his car, I don’t call him a “mun2”, I just think he’s Mexican. If an American/white person wears a stars and stripes shirt in France, or in the middle of New York city, I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t qualify him/her to be called a hick. So, why do Filipinos have to automatically be classified as overly proud if we wear gear that represents the Philippines?

TL;DR Nobody should be able to completely classify and stereotype a whole race, because to do so would be to say that you’ve either met every Filipino in the world, or that you’ve met such a significant amount that you would be in a position to be able to conclude such a heavy judgement. However, with the examples that you gave, I believe you went in to a library full of books and went right back out after seeing a shelf full of the Twilight series. 

THIS ^^ Amen!