The Filipino Bunkhouse

In  “My Family’s Slave,” which appeared in The Atlantic a few days ago, Alex Tizon described how "Lola" immigrated to America with his family as a de facto slave and remained in that status for the rest of her life. "It took Tizon a while to realize his family had a slave," Jesse Singal reports in New York Magazine, "and he then spent the rest of his life grappling with what that meant about him and his parents." Singal continues, "One category of response, though, seems to have picked up a bunch of steam online — that the story is simply bad because it “normalizes” or “apologizes for” slavery."

Singal argues below that "all of us" could have found ourselves in a circumstance resembling Tizon's situation. I did.

I spent a portion of my K-12 years wintering in a fishing village in the Alaskan bush, and attending a one-room school with a dozen pupils. There was a salmon cannery, closed except for a caretaker during the winter, a long walk from one end of the village. One spring a classmate told me, laughing, how a Filipino from the cannery had drawn his attention to a "McPie," that is, a magpie as pronounced in a Tagalog accent.

Decades later I had a Filipino supervisor, who told me he had campaigned against the segregation of Filipinos in Alaskan salmon canneries. I knew about them — the "Filipino bunkhouse" in most Kodiak Island canneries — and never realized the ethical problem. Nor did my classmate, himself an Alaska native. "We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing."

 

When one realizes that what Arendt called "the banality of evil"(1) can touch any of us, Singal's humane objection to the knee-jerk ideological condemnation of Tizon's courageous last work, below, stands as corrective to the present climate. Singal:

All of us — I really mean this; I really mean you and your family and everyone you love — could, in a different historical context, have been a slaver or a Holocaust-perpetrator or at the very least decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to contest these grotesque crimes. Because that’s the human condition: We don’t have easy access to a zoomed-out view of morality and empathy. We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing.

I don't know about you, but the idealistic teenager I was lived comfortably with the Filipino bunkhouse, because everybody around me did.

 

(Excerpts (2) and (3) from Singal below.)

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(1) In Eichmann in Jerusalem: "One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was "highly desirable", while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more "normal" in his habits and speech than the average person."

(2) "One of the key themes of Tizons’ article is that his family was, in many senses, almost a caricature of the striving, American-dream-seeking immigrant experience. They were normal. They were normal and yet they had a slave. To which one could respond, “Well, no, they’re not normal — they are deranged psychopaths to have managed to simply live for decades and decades with a slave under their roof. That is not something normal people do, and it’s wrong to portray it as such.”"

(3) "But the entire brutal weight of human history contradicts this view. Normal people — people who otherwise have no signs of derangement or a lack of a grip on basic human moral principles — do evil stuff all the time. One could write millions of pages detailing all the times when evil acts were perpetrated, abetted, or not resisted by people who were, in every other respect, perfectly normal. It’s safe to say, to a certain approximation, that all of us — I really mean this; I really mean you and your family and everyone you love — could, in a different historical context, have been a slaver or a Holocaust-perpetrator or at the very least decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to contest these grotesque crimes. Because that’s the human condition: We don’t have easy access to a zoomed-out view of morality and empathy. We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing."