Wazzup Pilipinas!
It is so funny that Filipinos are really obsessed in getting white like Caucasians. I still remember when everything that has glutathione was highly in demand and up until now when skin whitening lotions and the likes are still very popular beauty product essentials for women, and even men, who want to achieve celebrity-like status.
This is mainly because in a country where the color of the skin is one of the main factors on how people are judged or perceived, we are normally categorized to belong in a class of higher standard if we are of the whiter variety.
Yeah, in the Philippines, when your complexion is white, you get to be regarded as somebody affluent, and considered to be among the beautiful, fit to land a job in sales or showbiz. Even other industries prefer their employees with pleasing personalities. However, it is so sad that they would perceive skin color as the basis for beauty.
Damn it! We are Filipinos that are supposed to be "Moreno" in skin color. We are originally brown in color as per our ancestors. I have no quarrel with the mixed race since we have become global and got intimately close with our foreign brothers (thus Fil-Ams were born). But we should not see their white skin color as the top ranking complexion, and looking down on the "brown" race as inferior.
How come many so called "white-complexioned" foreigners are doing the opposite? They often visit the beaches to get a tan. They even have skin-toning centers to make their skin golden brown. For other countries, having the "brown" color is the sign of affluence since they obviously have the dough to spend time getting a tan traveling to the beaches and tropical countries of the world.
While we spend a lot in cosmetic shops and visiting beauty parlors or skin centers to get bleached, we forget our real origins. Our ancestors were born with the golden brown color. Not too pale, not too dark. We are somewhere in between - absolutely the best skin color there is. We should be proud to be brown.
We therefore would like to thank Mikey Bustos for keeping to his theme of supporting Filipino culture and never forgetting about his roots. We are proud to have fellow Filipinos who may have traveled and lived in another part of the world outside the Philippines but continues to come back and believe in the Filipinos as a great race.
Though, admittedly, Mikey is still fairer compared to the rest of his back-ups in the video, he's a lot closer to home than the rest of the celebrities out there who patronize and endorse whitening solutions as if they really use it. I always laugh every time a brand recruits a celebrity endorser who already has a white complexion in the first place. It is so deceiving!
Better listen to Mikey Bustos' creatively humorous video with a Twerk It Like Miley Cyrus parody. The video has a lot of truth in it. He's just being kind enough to point out our faults the nicest way possible - singing about it.
What keeps Mikey Bustos' YouTube videos very interesting and entertaining is he makes a lot of effort dressing up and applying all those make-up to role-play other characters. You also learn facts about the Philippines and the Filipino pop culture. From singing about the duck fetus "balut" delicacy to our very own monsters like aswangs, tikbalangs and kapres, people all over the world get to learn some facts about the Philippines - the country we all love.
But why am I still not surprised when we would still be among the first ones to drop everything we are doing just to hop aboard a plane every time there's an opportunity to visit or live in another country. Many of us have not even visited majority of the Philippines yet would always have foreign destinations as their top choice on their travel itineraries.
I know there may be a lot of times when it is tough to be a Filipino, but we should be bringing home what we've been learning from the other countries and innovatively making it work for our country's benefit. At the end of the day, whether we like it or not, it still remains to be our home country. It is up to us to make it better.
It starts with accepting who and what we are. Let no Western thinking blind us from realizing we are beautiful inside and out.