“An Augury of Good Intentions”: Black Teachers and Colonial Education in the Philippines

In the first half of the twentieth century, the US government sent thousands of American teachers to participate in colonial education in the Philippines, including a small number of African American men and women. While most scholarly attention has focused on the experience of black soldiers in empire, the presence of black civilians in the Philippines disrupted the narrative of white racial supremacy and complicated the seemingly simple racial hierarchy of empire, which placed white colonizers above a nonwhite native population.  In turn, seemingly straightforward race relations between blacks and whites were complicated by the project of empire – American race relations could not simply be pasted onto the context of the Philippines.  As Americans and colonial officials, black teachers were important members in the communities in which they lived, and their authority as civilizers was largely upheld by the colonial bureaucracy.

Participation in empire offered black Americans the chance to achieve professional, class, and social positions that were often denied at home, and to gain experiences, that would not have been possible without a colonial position.  Black teachers, moreover, presented themselves as uniquely fitted to uplift the Filipino, claiming that they shared a special racial sympathy with Filipinos, and that this sympathy made them the more effective colonizers than white Americans.  The relationship between African American teachers and Filipinos, however, was not free from the politics of empire.  Even as they sympathized with the national aspirations of Filipinos, black teachers benefitted from the fundamental imbalance of power between colonizers and colonized.  As they negotiated the rocky terrain of colonial education and imperial politics, many black teachers began to articulate a sense of a global colored identity, and linked the anti-colonial movement in the Philippines with their own fight for rights in the United States.