This essay is dedicated to Peter Emmanuel Mara and Eds Abadam-Mara, my dear friends. Sending you love and strength.
There is something discomfiting about referring to certain groups of people as resilient. Resilience here refers to the ability to withstand and recover from adversity and return to efficient, everyday functioning. Say you’re a frontline worker in our world being ravaged by Covid-19. When all you can do is endure in the face of death and despair, being praised for your resilience can bring up bewilderingly difficult feelings. On the one hand, the compliment applauds your well-earned heroism; on the other, it confirms your wretched fate. No wonder the word ‘resilient’ sometimes triggers discomfort, suspicion, and resistance, especially when the praise is made by those who don’t have it as tough.
Many of my Filipino relatives and friends work in the health sector. I find it extraordinary that they can keep on working in these stressful and hostile circumstances. Being resilient in their jobs is praiseworthy. It’s been suggested that their work ethic is worth emulating. But calling them resilient is also patronizing, especially when precious little is being done to ease their lot. It’s as if we expect them to weather every imaginable challenge thrown by this protracted pandemic. Yes, some of them might make it, spectacularly broken but alive. Others won’t. As Joy Sales points out: “Filipinos comprise about 1% of the U.S. population, yet they represent 7% of healthcare workers (about 150,000 people), and as of August 2020, 30 percent of the 193 registered nurses who have died from COVID-19 are Filipino. These statistics reveal a dark underbelly to the ‘heroes’ narrative: Filipino labor is essential, but their lives are not.” In other words, the rhetoric of resilience can sweeten oppression into virtue and distract us from the work that needs to be done. Filipino workers (mostly women), along with other historically marginalized groups, have had to endure many harms and cruelties for being stereotyped as resilient heroes.
Resilience is ambivalent. This claim may appear confusing at first, since resilience is overwhelmingly depicted in popular books as a moral good or as a component to human flourishing. Against this common take, I argue that we need to recognize the ambivalence of resilience to honor and respond to the plight and fortitude of resilient individuals and groups like Covid-19 frontline workers, typhoon survivors, victims of racism, and teachers. I argue that their resilience should neither be uncritically celebrated nor completely rejected.
The Upside of Resilience
Being ambivalent means simultaneously having opposed and contradictory attitudes about something, due to it having both positive and negative attributes. Let’s look at what’s laudable about resilience first. A positive feature of resilience is that it is hard-won. It results from facing something difficult or surviving challenging experiences. Persons discover that they are resilient if, in the face of a moral challenge or a tragedy, they bend and not break. An image familiar to the Filipino consciousness that captures this idea is the bamboo swaying in the wind. As folk wisdom in Tagalog goes:
Ang tao ay kawayan ang kahambing
Sumusuko’t umaayon sa hagupit ng hangin
Hindi sumasalungat kundi nagpupugay
Upang hindi mabakli ang sariling tangkay
To a bamboo, a man can be compared—
It surrenders its will to the whipping wind
It does not oppose it, but in obeisance it gives praise
That it may preserve its bough from a shattering fate
[Translation by Jonathan Ray Villacorta]
The wind is a force of nature, independent and external to our existence. One must move with its blasts, yield if needed, to grow hardily and elegantly. Resilience is a quality of character you acquire when you learn how to dance with the wind. It is a beautiful, compelling image, but hardly visible to anyone amid a thunderstorm or a never-ending monsoon.
This view of human resilience being hard-won is hardly controversial. Pragmatist philosophers think of resilience as an outcome, whether their accounts see it as a disposition, an adaptive process, a form of wisdom, a virtue, a feature of communities, a moral value, or an amoral concept. The consensus that human resilience results from overcoming adversity illuminates why, in my view, the idea lends itself well for describing the lived experience of vulnerable or marginalized groups, since their resilience brings clarity to our evaluation of oppressive conditions and systems. Initially, it seems appropriate to describe just about any social group with staying power as resilient. One could say that white supremacists and Filipino nurses are members of resilient people: they have staying power and keep the wheels of the neoliberal agenda turning. But both white supremacy and capitalism are part of the dominant global milieu, responsible for legitimizing the norms and social practices that the rest of us have to follow. Those who benefit from their whiteness and control over 90% of the world’s resources do not have to earn their staying power; the status quo ensures not just their survival but also predicates their success. In short, we need to separate the idea of resilience as a product of resistance against oppression from the features in our social life that are supported and enabled by oppressive systems. The former is what we ought to honor and admire; the latter is what we destroy and rebuild from.
Weaponizing Resilience
The fact that human resilience is earned, and that it helps us evaluate oppressive conditions and systems, are reasons to celebrate it. But the affirmative aspects of resilience are married to its negative aspects; its rewards and costs are intertwined. The charge of human resilience, I claim, can be hermeneutically shaping: it can enable a damaging sense of expectation from resilient individuals and groups, leading to their continued exploitation.
The endurance of resilient persons endangers them. Exploiters of resilience can turn the earned self-protective capacity of medical workers, asylum seekers, and sexual abuse survivors into a distraction or an excuse for neither accounting nor correcting social injustices. Worse, resilient persons who fall prey to the hero narrative may come to believe that their oppression is deserved. They may even feel grateful for their toughness, expecting other vulnerable people like them to suffer to merit their respect, and then resent them when they don’t. Put differently, parading certain people and groups as resilient can be a way of controlling them and keeping their revolutionary energies at bay. The political and psychosocial harms from weaponizing resilience inspired Vinita Srivastava of the Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast to challenge how the term is used in the public sphere, stating:
I believe we should always celebrate resilience: the human ability to recover or adjust to difficult conditions. But for many marginalized people, including Black, Indigenous and racialized people, being labelled resilient — especially by policy-makers — has other implications. The focus on resilience and applauding people for being resilient makes it too easy for policy-makers to avoid looking for real solutions.
We should not reject what is valuable about human resilience. There is something amiss in failing to acknowledge the strength and courage of individuals and groups. But our awe and acknowledgement of human resilience are not enough; we should also be cautious of the socio-political function the term performs and whose interests it truly serves.
To summarize: the positive and negative aspects of human resilience stand in direct relation to each other. We need to learn how to live with its ambivalence. What is at stake is our capacity to authentically honor resilient individuals and groups and alleviate their risk of exploitation. The ambivalence of resilience can also orient how to act. As Srivastava puts it, we need to be “in search of solutions for those things no one should have to be resilient for.”
Resilience in the Global North
Though less critical to our need for Covid-19 frontliners, my resilience as a Filipina philosopher matters. Being reminded of the ambivalence of my condition shores up tense and sometimes violent feelings. In the next paragraphs, I translate how my analysis of resilience undergirds my experience as a global Filipina scholar in philosophy.
Becoming American remains an aspiration for many Filipinos today, a dream borne by the lingering shadow of colonialism and cultural imperialism. In the Manila of the 90s where I grew up, entering the U.S. was like traveling to Filipino Mecca and becoming a U.S. citizen was seen as an achievement. I remember my jealousy as a kid when a friend with money said she spent her summer in America while I spent mine baking in the hot provincial winds of Cabiao, Nueva Ecija; after being granted multiple entry visas, I recall my mother’s face beaming: “we don’t look like TNTs” (TNT is abbreviation for ‘tago ng tago,’ a label for illegal Filipino aliens in the U.S.). I was 19 when I met extended relatives in California for the first time; more have moved to the U.S. since then. The mantra behind Filipino immigration is this: life is better there than here. I regret not questioning this when I left the Philippines in my mid-twenties, a decision I made in haste out of opportunity and quiet desperation.
My U.S. visa application at the moment of writing is pending because of pandemic-related difficulties; in Australia, I have permanent residency. That I am a Filipino whose existence is judged as ‘acceptable’ or even ‘desirable’ in these countries leaves a bittersweet taste. Every step I take in embassies, college rooms, and philosophy seminars feels simultaneously like a boon and a burden. That I can legally live in Sydney and Connecticut is regarded by other Filipinos as enviable. In this picture, achievement is set so low that what I accomplish always comes as a surprise. That I could aspire to be a professor in the Global North did not cross my mind until my 30s; philosophers bred in lower middle-class Manila just didn’t have ambitions of that sort (I owe much to non-traditional philosophers for expanding my imagination). A reward for my resilience is a good sense of the hardship I can take. When people complain about being an academic in developed countries, I look back at my experience of teaching and research in the Philippines and think: “this, compared to that, is easy.” A cost of this resilience is the nagging, lonely feeling that, given the privileges I enjoy now, I have to succeed. But success is an amorphous beast: I struggle to articulate what a Filipina philosopher success story is supposed to be.
I remember Professor Emerita Ruth Millikan’s recollection of teaching philosophy for the first time. In a UConn Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) meeting, she recalled not knowing how to act like a ‘woman’ philosophy professor, having never been taught by one before. Fortunately, being the ‘first of its kind’ in our discipline is becoming rarer, thanks to the resilience of people who had to be the first. Indeed, the reward of our resilience is discovering our connection to others. This reward is tied to its cost: what binds us are our multifarious experiences of being kept out. The scourge of academia is rooted in its exclusionary practices and we need to fight this battle creatively and sustainably. As outsiders to the dominant White/Anglo organization of life in the U.S., María Lugones recommends that women of color wilfully (and playfully) ‘world’-travel: that we skilfully navigate academic spaces in the spirit of learning, understanding, and loving. Groups like the APA Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies are valuable to me for this reason. Our shared hope is a future where relations of equality and respect are at the forefront. While this remains out of reach, we adapt to a resilient form of living, one that allows us to co-habit worlds that are ill-designed for our success and engage in the processes of transforming them.
Philosophy in the Philippines
Being resilient in academia can give rise to simultaneously opposing sentiments, mostly in the spectrum of pride and resentment, peppered with loneliness and camaraderie. But what happens when this resilience is misrecognized, taken for granted, or deliberately ignored? Interestingly, the misappropriation or neglect of resilience can also give rise to ambivalent responses, from feelings of vindication to disappointment. Take colleagues or students who believe that your place is rooted in your being a brown woman. Never mind what you’ve written or how well you teach; the essential bit is your ethnicity and gender preference. You’re vindicated in knowing that our social ills remain as monstrous as ever and you’re also damned for your resilience in academia. I have nursed wounded egos of friends and mentees, including my own, who have had to deal with this prejudice.
This dissatisfaction is resonant in the Global North, where the catchwords of ‘diversity,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘inclusion’ can take on pernicious forms. But academic spaces in the Global South have their malaises too; in the Philippines, it takes the shape of invalidation, dismissal, and erasure of women’s voices. One reason I left my country is because my future then seemed dark and stunted, given the resentment and misogyny against Filipina philosophers. Now that I’m in a less precarious situation, I’m committed to exposing and addressing the factors that continue to harm others like me. I’m an active member of Women Doing Philosophy (WDP), an organization that aims to create and claim spaces that promote the scholarly, professional, and personal flourishing of Filipina philosophers. Academic philosophy in the Philippines is toxic to women (see lectures on toxic academic cultures, underrepresentation and tokenism in philosophy, misogyny in Filipino philosophy, and an entry on sexual harassment in the academe). But instead of recognizing our serious and ongoing concerns, the Philosophical Association of the Philippines (PAP), the largest and most prestigious philosophy organization in the country, is failing to respond appropriately to gender-based trauma and support the well-being of many Filipina philosophers. PAP’s response to WDP’s initial refusal to collaborate in February 2021—a decision based on the negative experiences of our members in PAP conferences, including sexual harassment—is to ignore and delegitimize the existence of WDP. Even with 111 members globally, over twenty public projects since 2020, and with most members working in Philippine institutions, Women Doing Philosophy is neither mentioned by the PAP organizers in their call for papers or the program of the event “On the Philippine Gender Turn and the Anthropocene” (November 2021, funded by the Hypatia Diversity Grant), as if their Filipina colleagues weren’t at the brink of staging an academic revolution. This negligence is inexcusable. Why discount the voices of hurt and angry women in the Philippines? Why is their activism excluded from the historical narrative being crafted by the PAP? Why are feminist philosophers in positions of power complicit in their silencing? Except for a few, why do men who recognize what’s wrong in the culture of philosophy in the Philippines so quiet?
Circling back to the beginning: while being called ‘resilient’ can be discomfiting, not being recognized as such is as equally disturbing – a confirmation of just how much, and how deeply, ambivalence structures resilience.
A longer version of this essay was presented at the Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies Committee Session (with a focus on Asian American Identity and the Immigrant Experience) of 2022 American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting.
Tracy Llanera
Tracy Llanera is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut - Storrs. She works at the intersection of philosophy of religion, social and political philosophy, and pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, conversion, and the politics of language. She is editor of Resilience: The Brown Babe’s Burden, the first collection of writings by Filipina philosophers (in progress).
