Blog 6 Coleen Herbert

      Anderson discusses the preemptive strategies put into place by Wachiwarut. These tactics included education, militarism, and a rewriting of history (Anderson 104). When the dominant groups anticipate the reactions of the oppressed, they succeed in marginalization and exclusion. This was by far the greatest triumph of colonialism. It is important to note that class had the largest influence on these policies: "In the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourns the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it" (62). When I read this statement, I was immediately reminded of what I observe to be white nostalgia for the 1950s. Anderson uses the term “mental miscegenation”(54) to explicate the philosophical, innately racist strategies of the colonizers. While this tactic is successful, it is obviously a form of covert, manipulative oppression: "The banquet to which they were invited always turned out to be a Barmecide feast"(62).

      To quote the title of one of Audre Lorde’s famous essays, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”. The trick to colonialism is that it makes this appear to be untrue. As we covered in class, the oppressed group comes to adopt the “tools” of their oppression. We observed this in Amigo. Religion is prescribed to the Fillipino women. It appears to provide an “outlet”. We discussed in class how this relationship is also an avenue of sexual exploitation, however.

      Instead of looking abroad, I think that we can find examples of anticipatory strategies within the boundaries of our own nation. For instance, we can consider the oppression of women’s sexuality. Starting an early age in our country, gender is made explicit to both women and men. Health courses, including the one my own school provided, are predominantly heterosexual and exclude several options of birth control. Abstinence programs and poor sex education disadvantage millions of women. Many women believe that this tactic is actually an exercise in agency. Education is preemptively withheld from the marginalized group. I have met women who hold this belief and postulate that access to sex education materials and birth control for young women especially is a form of oppression. What I argue is that patriarchy has been such an established institution in our country for so long that women have come to adopt its ideology and now express their independence using the “master’s tools”.