Theodoropoulos ’27: John Hay helped colonize the Philippines. The least Brown can do is give us a language class.
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About a year ago, I received a text from Brown’s Southeast Asian Studies Initiative about an upcoming course, taught by SEASI and Filipino Alliance ally Grace Talusan: ENGL1050Y:“Traces of Empire: Writing Filipino and American Experiences.” The title alone lingered with me — an invitation to follow the traces, to excavate what history had been buried.While the American colonization of the Philippines is no secret, it is memorialized only in traces within the American imagination. But, the fact that many Americans have forgotten this story is no coincidence: It is the product of historical erasure, an erasure that endures at Brown. To begin undoing it, the University must confront its imperial legacy and offer Tagalog as an act of long-overdue redress.In her Harvard Crimson op-ed, Eleanor Wikstrom detailed how Harvard’s former president helped spearhead the U.S.’s assault on the instruction of Tagalog, a Filipino language, on the islands. Equally culpable in this assault was Brown alum...