When you’re surrounded by these images … it can get to you sometimes.” “I saw these billboards before I became an actor, and it had already made me upset seeing them,” she said. “There is messaging around me that makes me frustrated or paranoid about what the future will hold,” the Patay Na si Hesus star said, referencing huge billboards along Manila’s major highways and commercials featuring white-skinned Filipinas being marketed as “ Kutis Pinay” (Filipina skin) and “ Kutis Artista” (Celebrity skin). Those deeply skewed standards of beauty - ones that Filipino children are being exposed to in primary school textbooks - are ones the up-and-coming indie film actress has been confronted with her entire life. That’s not a concept you need to explain to Chai Fonacier.

“Right from the get-go, from childhood, Filipinos are already bombarded and inculcated with these ideas.” “Media - film and television and magazines - have a huge role in perpetuating the idea that lighter skin is more desirable than dark skin,” David said. While there have been successful darker-skinned actors, they have always been an inexplicable minority. We’re talking about an industry in which a drama series that aired this decade - Nita Negrita - featured a half-black Filipino character played by a light-skinned actress with a makeup job that would have made Al Jolson proud. To say mestizo actors dominate prime time would be a ludicrous understatement. According to the latest National Geographic genome study, the average Filipino has less than five percent European ancestry, and if you’ve spent more than a few minutes on the streets of Manila, that percentage will instinctively feel about right.īut turn on your TV, and those percentages can feel suddenly flipped on their head. “So to finally have major lead roles for brown-skinned characters, which is rare, and yet have naturally brown-skinned actors passed over for those roles … It simply reinforces the light-skin bias in society and does nothing to empower and lift up brown-skinned actors – and brown-skinned Filipinos more generally.”īrown-skinned Filipinos, of course, represent the country’s overwhelming majority. “ problematic because there is an abundance of talented and naturally brown-skinned actors in the Philippines,” he said. David, author of Brown Skin, White Minds, pointed out the painfully obvious issues with the casting decision last week in a chat with Coconuts Manila. If any of this is coming as a shock, you don’t know much about Filipino television.

The cast of Bagani. Photo from ABS-CBN News That might explain why a bunch of ancient Filipinos would be half white, but it did considerably less to explain why they’d be dark-skinned but played by mestizo actors covered in bronzer.

Brown Skin, White Minds by E.J.R. David