The Sunday Times Racial discrimination on the supermarket shelf


HIRLEY, 16, hid in her bed room lying on her face and crying. She refused to go to school. Her mother, Maria, with gentle persuasion, got her to sit up and take her hands away from covering her face. Maria gasped, her child’s face was a blotch of angry red blotches.


S


“What happened, what caused this?” asked Maria with sympa- thy. “There, I hate it,” Shirley cried and threw a tube of “skin white” bleaching lotion on the floor, her face a flame of fury. It was a “made in China” product and no one could read the ingre- dients. The child had been influ- enced by the television and the poster ads telling everyone to bleach their skin white and they will be beautiful, attractive and shine like a film star.


The ads suggest that dark


skinned people are not as accept- able as white. Shirley fell for it and now had a reaction to the chemi- cals in the cream. Many of these products contain dangerous levels of mercury that can cause skin rashes, brain damage and kidney failure among other side effects. Even though the Philippine


government banned a few brands of these dangerous products, they are still found in many stores. The non-enforcement of laws is per- haps the single most devastating and crippling cause of poverty, crime, and harm to the Filipino people. Shirley is just one more victim among thousands. The marketing of skin whiten- ing creams and lotions is a bil- lion peso industry in the Philip- pines and even more in the rest of Asia. Millions of Asian peo- ple are beguiled into believing


FR. SHAY CULLEN


that the western standard of white skin connotes beauty to which all should aspire. Such products and their promo- tional advertisement, billboards and magazine ads are insulting to all non-white people. What are they saying in effect to people of darker skin color? “If you are not white-skinned you are not beau- tiful” or worst “You are ugly. You need to get white skin and even have cosmetic surgery and be like us.” This is not an exclusive west-


No walk in the park I


F Manny Paquiao thought that he was just out to earn some quick cash while waiting for a worthier opponent than Antonio Margarito, he was promptly brought to reality. He spent all of 12 rounds trying to dispose of him despite the fact that his trainer Freddie Roach thought he would finish Margarito in the first. Judging from the lackadaisical


way he spent the early part of his training, many believed that and Manny agreed with Roach’s as- sessment of his opponent. As it turned out, he found his work cut out for him. While it didn’t end in the first round, the fight could have been stopped on the eighth and saved both Manny and Margarito a lot of suffering. Indeed Manny had asked Ref- eree Laurence Cole to stop the fight in the 10th. Manny was quoted as saying, “I told the referee, Look at his eyes, look at his cuts . . . ” Later he said, “I did not want to damage him permanently. That’s not what boxing is about. It’s a sport. It’s not for killing people.”


Margarito has only been stopped once before—by Shane Moseley. And up to the end, he continued to pack the punch that could still put an opponent away. But although he caught Manny several times on the ropes, Manny showed he could take his punches and slither out of trou- ble while throwing stinging right and left combinations. Manny went up the fight some 18 pounds lighter and 4 l/2 inches shorter but faster. The fight was something like that of Primo Carnera, a 6 l/2 feet giant weigh- ing some 280 pounds who won the world heavyweight champi- onship in 1933 by knocking out Jack Sharkey in the sixth round.


BY MARIA ANTONOVA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE


MOSCOW: A century ago, all of Russia mourned Leo Tolstoy’s death at a backwater train station. But today the novelist and pacifist, who abhorred any form of government, is more respected in the West than his home country. The centennial of Tolstoy’s death,


100 years ago Saturday, seems to be passing virtually unnoticed in Russia. No specials in state channels’ primetime schedules. No retrospectives in Russia’s main state museums. Facing the moral dilemmas posed by Russia’s most famous son would simply be “inconvenient.” “He is just as inconvenient today


as a century ago . . . to mark the date you have to think of Russia’s past 100 years, which nobody wants to do,” said Pavel Basinsky, author of Flight From Heaven, a recent book on the circumstances of the great novelist’s run in the dark of the night from his estate in Yasnaya Polyana. Fleeing from his home and wife


of 48 years with just 50 rubles in his pocket, 82-year Tolstoy rushed from one monastery to another before catching a cold on a train and dying at a small train station in Astapovo, Lipetsk region. Researchers routinely point to


the writer’s last years and days as a focal point for Russia, which was about to face World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. “It was a death that shook the


world, it was a symbolic event,” director of Tolstoy’s museum in Moscow Vitaly Remizov told Agence France-Presse.


mob and won the championship on a series of bouts set up by his handlers. Stanley Woodward, then sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune reminisces about it in his book Sports Page. “The Tribune had become the


BENJAMIN G. DEFENSOR


He held the crown for just a day less that a year. On June 14, 1934 he lost it to Max Baer on June 14, 1934 when he was knocked out in the 11th round after having been knocked down 11 times. Baer lost the crown to Jimmy Braddock who in turn lost it to Joe Louis who in turn knocked him out in the eighth-round after suffering a knockdown in the first. Louis’s victory inaugurated a new era in boxing. But before that, he had his turn in knocking out Carnera. Manny’s win over Margarito reminds old boxing fans (those still living anyway) of the Louis- Carnera fight. Louis won on the strength of his explosive fists. At 260 pounds and 6 feet 6 +


inches, Carnera looked over- whelming over a trim Louis at 6 feet 2 + inches. Carnera’s powder- puff left jab kept Louis away from his face and jaw. So instead of re- lying on speed, which he had, Louis used his power in softening up Carnera with body punches. For three rounds, in the second, third and fourth, Louis relentlessly pounded Carnera’s body. By the fifth, unable to keep his hands up because of the beating he was get- ting, Carnera became ripe for at- tacks on the head. And Louis knocked him out in the sixth. Carnera was reported to be controlled by the New York fight


Herald Tribune when Carnera de- feated Jack Sharkey for the champi- onship on June 29, 1933. Like most newspapers, it has become pretty fatuous about sports and did not catch any of the malodorous ema- nations which arose from the fight. It was agreed that it was a one- punch fight in which Carnera hit Sharkey with a right upper cut . . . “All the newspaper writing on this fight was bad. The boys in gen- eral missed the fact that Carnera was a ninth-rate boxer who has been built up to championship propor- tions by one of the most spurious and villainous campaigns in the history of sports. I do not mean to allege at this late date that Sharkey was a party to deception. It is possi- ble that he was so past of his peak by this time that even a Carnera up- percut was sufficient to lay him low. “However, as events have ful- somely proved, the reporters of the Carnera age were either wide- eyed or bought. It would be kinder for me to say they were crooks, but I gravely fear many of them were something worse—ironheads. “Almost never in the whole his- tory of sports writing was the press so notably bad as during the Carnera campaigns. It is true that the boys did fail to pin down the crooked World Series of 1919, won by the Cincinnati Reds over t3he Chicago White Sox. The scan- dal didn’t break for nearly a year. However, the machinations of nine ball players on a field are harder to evaluate than that of one big hunk in a ring on whose edge


POLITICS AND LITERATURE


A century after his death, Tolstoy is now sidelined in Russia in a vicious circle‘We are stuck


But Remizov conceded the


centennial is not marked on a grand scale in the country, with most events awaited only by the literary and museum community. Most events marking the date are


going to take place away from Russia’s capital. A restored museum will open doors in Astapovo on Saturday, followed by a scholarly forum that is unlikely to draw a massive audience. Hollywood’s The Last Station starring Helen Mirren, the latest take on Tolstoy’s dramatic flight from his estate in the dreary autumn days in 1910, is playing on 35 screens in the capital. But Russian studios, usually eager


to produce a lavish epic on state funds, have kept mum. Compared with Russia’s darling


Alexander Pushkin, a celebrated poet whose birth bi-centennial in 1999 was a grandiose event that led to initiating an official Pushkin Day, Tolstoy is perceived as a heavy, moralizing figure, who in today’s Russia would likely be labeled as extremist. “He would likely not be pleased if


he saw Russia today,” said Vladimir Tolstoy, the writer’s great grandson, who heads the main estate museum in Yasnaya Polyana, where the writer’s numerous family resided until its nationalization in 1921.


’


“He liked truth, and in Russia this is a time of many lies and hypocrisy,” Tolstoy told Agence France-Presse. The author of the celebrated


novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina was a larger than life figure even in his lifetime. “We have two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy,” contemporary Alexei Suvorin wrote in 1901. But the ideas he adopted and


professed in the second part of his life—of nonviolence, asceticism, and refusal to pass down inherit- ance—were too ahead of his time. In Russia, many such ideas still are, 100 years later. “His ideas of giving up material


wealth seem absurd in Russia, where we are in a period of money-grabbing capitalism,” Basinsky said, adding that while “Tolstovian gestures” like refusing colossal inheritance to one’s children can come from Bill Gates, they are unlikely to be made by any Russian oligarch. Marking Tolstoy’s death would also put the Orthodox Church, which has achieved an increased clout and wealth in the past 20 years, in an awkward position, as the writer is still formally excommunicated. The writer rejected many


religious dogmas, and his novel


the flower and chivalry of the press was virtually resting its chin. “ . . . I doubt that a hoax like the Carnera build-up could be put over on the current crop of boxing writ- ers. It probably could not have been put over even on the old gang if one of Carnera’s opponents, Ernie Schaaf, had not died follow- ing a fight with the Italian. This convinced some of the cynics that Carnera was formidable, in spite of the fact that he looked as if he couldn’t break a pane of glass. The death of Schaaf was the convincer which permitted the banditti to put over their brassy plan to turn the gentle giant into a champion. “The mob that ran Carnera is scattered or dead. Other more conservative gangs of mobsters are in the boxing business. What I mean to convey is that the box- ing assignment is not one to be given to a reporter whose forte is naiveté. [Here or over there].” Sports Page was published in 1949. Things must have changed since then. American novelist and Hollywood screenwriter, Budd Schulberg, dramatized Carnera’s story and the fight movie in his book, The Harder They Fall. In the wake of Manny’s on- slaught, Margarito suffered a frac- tured right eye socket and had to be operated on. His face was swollen, his right eye closed with a big cut under it. Manny’s two hands were swollen from hitting Margarito’s face. His own face was bruised and swelling too. But as a consolation, he won some $25 million. Margarito may not get as much but was expected to receive a good purse. For both, it was all in the way of a good day’s work, even if the fight was not a walk in the park.


opinion@manilatimes.net


ern notion. Other societies with elites have it too. It discriminates against the common person. The racial superiority behind these products reinforces profil- ing and discrimination by skin color. Immigration and police are prone to suspect dark-skinned people as being somehow more suspect than white-looking peo- ple. This leads to racial profiling that many traveling Asians expe- rience at western airports and immigration counters.


The products succeed in the market place and are accepted by non-white people in the millions perhaps because of a colonial men- tality that accepts western colonialists as superior whom they wished to imitate. This acceptance resulted in part from mind-condi- tioning and racist slogans such as “white is might and so white is


right.” Western colonial regimes left their mark on the cultures of the people they once ruled. Today, globalization and the ag-


gressive marketing of western prod- ucts and brands encourage people of other cultures to adopt western fashion in clothes, looks and stand- ards of beauty. Western superiority and the racism that comes from it has been growing in Asia since the 19th century. World War II, the Ko- rean and Vietnam wars, and the in- vasion of Iraq and Afghanistan have established the superiority of west- ern military power. It has inculcated an inferiority complex in many Asians, a form of cultural submis- sion to western mores and a desire to imitate them and be like them. But some nations have bravely re- sisted and fought back for their own national identity, freedom and dig- nity. Yet today the cosmetic indus-


try has seemingly conquered where marching armies failed.


The Philippines is a case in point. Society imitates western fashion and life style and millions aspire to be westernized and migrate to America, their former colonial mas- ter. As a result, many young people are losing their sense of identity. They are lacking in self-confidence and -esteem and aspire to be what they are not. We need to teach them that beauty is in the spirit and personality of human being, it is not merely an external attribute and it does not depend on skin color, hairstyle or fashion. We are all born with equal human rights and dignity and we must oppose all forms of racial discrimination wherever we find it, especially when it’s on the supermarket shelf.


Preda@info.com.ph


2010 national conference on information education


Part three B


ELOW is part three of the key- note speech I delivered during the National Conference on Infor- mation Technology Education with the theme “Building an IT Enabled Nation” on October 21, 2010 at La Carmela de Boracay Convention Center, Station 2, Boracay, Malay, Aklan. The speech is 1,852 words long. The Manila Times issue of Sunday November 7 had Part 1, fol- lowed by part 2 on Sunday Novem- ber 14. Today, Sunday November 21, has the conclusion of my speech. ❋ ❋ ❋


In the developing world scientific and technological research after World War II was largely state-sup- ported in government research insti- tutions. This has changed radically universities in Asia and pacific region. The most revealing change has taken place in China where the university- based research is now more in line with the West. A number of devel- oping countries are pushing forward ambitious agenda to raise the amount for quality of their research. The Brazilian System awards


10,000 Ph.Ds and 30,000 MAs each year a 300-percent growth in the years. Graduate programs are ranked in terms of their research productiv- ity and financed accordingly. A survey on the budget HEIs allo- cate for these R&D program revealed that in most cases rely about 1 per- cent of the total operating budget. In the proposed CHED policies and standards for the grant of university status, 3 percent of the total operat- ing cost must be allocated for re- search. In the Philippines, we have yet to identify a research university. Without implementable research and without executing this imple- mentable research we’ll remain at the tail end among the top univer- sities in the world.


THE USE OF ICT The traditional university will be ren-


dered obsolete with the advent of IT, distance education and other tech- nology-induced innovation. While the demise of the traditional univer- sity will not take place anytime soon, major change is taking place and ICT is one of the key parts of the academic transformation of the 21st century.


Resurrection especially irked the Russian Orthodox Church, which announced publicly in 1901 that Tolstoy can no longer be consid- ered its member. Although Tolstoy’s grandchildren


asked Russia’s former patriarch Alexy II to reconsider, he said “reconsidering is possible only if the person changes his position.” Tolstoy was buried without any ritual near his estate, and no cross adorns his simple grassy mound of a grave. Since Tolstoy lived, “violence and alienation only increased” in Russian society, said Abdusalam Guseinov, director of the Philosophy Institute in the Russian Academy of Sciences. “There are policemen with clubs walking city streets,” he said, “20 years ago it would be impossible to imagine.” The parallels between the time of


Tolstoy’s passing and today are scary, said Basinsky, “starting from the fact that a revolution-prone situation is having extremely rich people and a mass of poor people.” “It’s a snowball that is gaining


momentum. The social fractures that Tolstoy exclaimed about— they are again prominent. It is tragic that history repeats itself in Russia, that we are stuck in a vicious circle,” he said.


Looking forward: Demographics and the


impact of economics Demographics will continue as a driving force for development and reform in the coming decades. The patterns and geographical scope will vary but the basic thrust will remain. Some of key elements are: 1. Student participation will continue to expand, as well as higher education systems; 2. Women will form slight ma- jority in student population in developed countries and later even to developing countries; 3. The mix of student popula- tion will become more varied, with greater number of interna- tional students, older student part- time and other types;


4. The social base in higher edu- cation will continue to broaden along with uncertainty about how


FELIZARDO Y. FRANCISCO


this will affect inequalities of edu- cational opportunities;


5. The academic profession will become more internationally ori- ented and mobile, but will still be structured in accordance with na- tional circumstances’


6. The activities and roles of the academic profession will be more di- versified and specialized and subject to varied employment contracts; and 7. For many developing coun-


tries, the need for ever expanding numbers of university teachers will mean that over all qualifications, now rather low, may not improve much and current relevance on part time staff may continue. My dear educators and fellow stu-


dents, as a developing country, the Philippines is likely to be affected and so with the public and private HEls. As there will be constraints on the budget of every family and the government will be unable to pro- vide the resources needed for their continued improvement. The mul- tiple and diverse responsibilities of higher education are ultimately key to the well being of modern society. Understanding the broader role in a globalized world is the first step to dealing constructively with the changes and challenges that will in- evitably loom on the horizon. The enormous challenge ahead is the uneven distribution of human capi- tal and funds that will allow some families to take full advantage of new opportunities while many poor families risk drifting far behinds. More than any other time, hand in hand, we need to work together to promote sustained global devel- opment in higher education. Rest assured that CHED will support you in your endeavor to promote qual- ity education. The future hinges on education. Applied knowledge changes the destiny of a person and the nation as well. We must use the gifts and talents given by God to promote progress and quality in higher education that in return may bring blessings to our country and its people. Thank you! Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! ❋ ❋ ❋


These are the references I used in preparing my speech. • Trends in Global Higher Edu- cation: Teaching in Academic Resolution-A Report Prepared for the Unesco 2009 World Confer- ence in Higher Education • Transformation of Philippine Higher Education in the Next Dec- ade-A 2010-2016 Development Plan Prepared by the Commission on Higher Education


• Brain Gain Initiative–A Unesco-CHED Project


• New Dynamics in Higher Educa- tion: From Development to Sustainable • Development – Michel Drancourt


dirfyf@yahoo.com Global view


SUNDAY


November 21, 2010


A 5


opinion


ONE MAN’S MEAT


REFLECTIONS


EDUCATION MATTERS


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