Minneapolis, Minnesota | Filipina/Mixed Race | She/Her/Hers

Redbone: “Redbone is a term historically used in much of the southern United States to denote a multiracial individual or culture.” (Wikipedia)

I am a 51 year old African American/Filipina “Redbone” Navy brat born in Olongapo City on Luzon, the most northern island in the Philippines (PI). I spent my first 15 years of life in Japan, CA, FL, and Hawaii. My father, an African American “Redbone” from the Southeastern US, was stationed in the PI during the Vietnam War where he met my mother, a Filipina from Manila.

When I was 15, we moved back to the Subic Bay Naval Base, next to Olongapo where I had lived until I was 4. We resided in base housing surrounded by a jungle of majestic trees, monkeys, bats, flying squirrels, boars, and snakes. Our backyard was the ancestral homelands of the Aeta, an indigenous Afro-Asiatic people who continue to be discriminated against for their darker skin and “kinky” hair.

I lived there for 3 years, attending the base high school; touring the country; dancing at clubs; and counting my blessings that I wasn’t one of the many Olongapo prostitutes my age. Olongapo was a designated R&R (Rest and Recreation) zone during the Vietnam War and prostitution remains legal there. The city’s main street is still filled with clubs where Filipinas are employed to “entertain.”

Because of the biases against darker skinned people, very few businesses, overall, were then and are now willing to employ Black AmerAsians, even those catering to African Americans. Women who look like me are often relegated to “street walking.” When off base, I was frequently and disdainfully asked by the town police for my “walking papers” – documents required to “legally” street prostitute. They were usually surprised and sometimes expressed envy that I was “American” because, I believe, I challenged the accepted social order – the established color and class hierarchy – as one of the few Black AmerAsians with married parents; “base privileges;” and all the benefits of US citizenship.

At 18, I had the option to give up that citizenship and be a “Philippine National.” After years of witnessing blatant racism against Black AmerAsians and Aeta people, I had no desire to give up my “American” identity. Despite the atrocities committed against my father’s African and Native ancestors by this country, I still had far greater opportunities here to be educated, build a career, travel, and enjoy the freedoms which those ancestors – over the past 400 years – lost everything but their souls for me to have.

I graduated high school and left the comfort of my “gated” military base community alone on an Air Force Tiger 747 for California to start college. I was idealistic and sheltered from the racism and other realities of being a “Redbone” woman in the US. But regardless of those realities, I will ALWAYS choose to be “American.” I was born in the Philippines but the US is the only place I truly feel at and can call “home.”