Posted on May 28, 2026 in Interviews
This TIE Talks features George B. Radics, a socio-legal scholar and senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. In this interview, George discusses his new book Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the “Lazy Native” and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines (2026), which explores how America’s colonization of the Philippines has shaped the nation’s contemporary political landscape, stoking religious conflict, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. He delves into how he first became interested in the topic as a graduate student, and how it developed over time as global geopolitics shifted and evolved. He also touches on the erasure of this legacy of colonization in American history and its impact on Filipino Americans, offering suggested readings for Americans to learn more about their country’s entangled heritage in the Philippines. To end, George reflects on how colonial legacies across contexts inform modern understandings of race and gender, even shaping regressive laws that still stand today, some of which are only now being struck down. As Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month comes to a close, this interview offers important insights into the United States’s colonial legacies in Southeast Asia, how these continue to impact the nation-building project in the Philippines, and how they inform understandings of race both at home and abroad.
I touched on this briefly in my interview with the New Books Network (available here), but at its core, this book grew out of my dissertation and was deeply shaped by my own identity as a Filipino American and my desire to better understand the Philippines. When I was first developing my PhD project, it was influenced by early 2000s anxieties about “Islamic terrorism,” which led me to focus on Mindanao, a region with a significant Muslim Filipino population. Over time, however, the thesis evolved into something much broader: an examination of postcolonial nation-building through a sociology of emotions lens, grounded in Philippine and Southeast Asian histories, experiences, and scholarship.
By the time I began preparing the manuscript, the global political climate had shifted. Populism, xenophobia, anti-Western sentiment in the Global South, and growing isolationism in the West were becoming increasingly prominent. As I workshopped the book, I was encouraged to make race—always an essential aspect of the project—more explicit in order to better connect its historical analysis to the urgent crises of the present. Doing so revealed a series of striking connections between racial formations in the United States and American rule in the Philippines. Questions about who counted as “civilized,” “developed,” and worthy of self-rule had always been central to this history, but the racial logics behind them became even more visible. In debates over public education in the Philippines, for example, the contrasting educational visions of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington for African Americans surfaced in colonial discussions. Likewise, as the Philippine-American War intensified, U.S. soldiers drew on memories and racial stereotypes formed through wars against Native Americans in their encounters with Filipinos. In the book, I argue that American colonial officials, soldiers, and teachers brought with them a racialized hierarchy whose effects continue to shape the Philippines today, particularly in the treatment of minorities such as Muslim Filipinos. In this way, U.S. history and Philippine history became deeply entangled, especially through the enduring force of race.
This is a great question. It highlights how the Muslim-Christian conflict is not the only conflict in the Philippines. The recent killing of 19 people by the Armed Forces of the Philippines during their military operations against the New People’s Army (NPA) just reiterates the postcolonial challenge of integrating different groups of people and ideologies into a multicultural, inclusive nation. In Mindanao, I argue in the book that part of the ongoing issue is the racialized hierarchy that the United States imported to the Philippines.
I also really appreciate the question about what Americans should know about the Philippines. A few days ago, I was engaging with a comment on my social media about how disappointing it is that Americans suffer from amnesia regarding the Philippine-American War. The reality is this amnesia goes much, much deeper. I think there is a disassociation and institutional erasure of America’s footprint in different parts of the world. For me, this was especially evident in the process of finding a publisher for my book. Obviously, there are several forces at play here, but my book—despite nearly half of it being about American actors and colonial figures—was branded explicitly Asian and passed off to presses’ Asian series, which seemed to be more interested in East and South Asia, and less in Southeast Asia.
One of the troubling aspects of this situation is that America’s footprint in Southeast Asia has continuing relevance for Southeast Asia, but also Southeast Asian Americans. Filipino Americans constitute the second-largest Asian American population, Tagalog is the fourth-most-spoken language in the United States, and Filipinos had formed communities in what is now the United States even before the American Declaration of Independence. Yet, we are often forgotten, understudied, and erased. A CDC study conducted by Diane L. Wolf in 1997 revealed that 45.6 percent of Filipina American youths had suicidal ideations, the highest among all ethnic groups in the United States.1 One study by Aurora Tompar-Tiu and Juliana Sustento-Seneriches revealed that the Filipino American depression rate among adults was 27.3 percent higher than that of the general population.2 In Brown Skin, White Minds (2013), E. J. R. David argues that these alarming statistics are the result of a colonial mentality caused by our history being censored and whitewashed, leading to many of us being ashamed of our culture, our skin color, our physical appearance, and just for being Filipino.
I think integrating more histories of America’s intervention in Southeast Asia could help to rectify this erasure and amnesia. As a Filipino American, I wanted to explore one aspect of the Filipino American experience. And as an American, I think it is important that we remember our history so that we don’t repeat it and trigger waves of refugees fleeing violence—violence to which our nation is often inextricably tied and, at times, responsible.
Lastly, with regard to the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), I think this document will become even more important in this era of heightened US-China tensions. One of the criticisms of the MDT was that while the Philippines has sent troops to Vietnam, Iraq, and other conflicts, thus fulfilling its obligations under the MDT, the US has never explicitly supported the Philippines’ territorial claims over islands disputed with China. Whether or not this will change in the current environment has yet to be seen. But this raises larger questions of how the Philippines continues to play a strategic role in US foreign relations, and how it deserves to be studied and recognized not just as a partner, but as an integral part of American history.
In conducting research for my manuscript, I visited several archives and conducted ethnographies, interviews, and focus groups across different parts of Mindanao over two decades. I first visited Mindanao to conduct research in 2003 and have made several trips back over the years. Additionally, I engaged in numerous conferences and workshops aimed at sharpening and understanding at a deeper level the context, history, concepts, and ideas that were not only relevant in the Mindanao context, but more importantly, also to Southeast Asia and the unique conditions we find ourselves in. It has been a very long journey.
It’s hard for me to list all the influential works that shaped this book and my thinking in general, but there are a few that stand out. Two giants in the field I would cite include Reynaldo Ileto and Vicente Rafael. Ileto’s “Orientalism and the study of Philippine Politics” (2001) and Rafael’s “Mimetic Subjects: Engendering Race at the End of Empire” (1995) are two pieces that really influenced my understanding of Philippine history and American influences upon it. Recent scholars on the Philippines who continue to advance our knowledge of the nation include Rhacel Parreñas, Marco Garrido, Julian Go, and Wataru Kusaka. And then there are those whose work made my own possible, such as Tess Tadem, Jowell Canuday, Father Bert Alejo, and Daniel Goh. Lastly, the title of my book was a tribute to the monumental influence of Syed Hussen Alatas’s The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977). Again, there is just so much amazing scholarship I’d like to cite here—the list goes on! But I would suggest people start with these works and to reach out to me if they’d like more references.
When I started writing Emotional Filipinos, the “war on terrorism” was still one of the predominant frameworks through which conflict throughout the world was being understood. Over time, I eventually realized the limitations and problems with this framework. Thus, postcolonial theory and the sociology of emotions became my preferred lenses because they helped me to look beyond the rhetoric and ideology of “terrorism” to comprehend deeper motivations behind conflict. They also allowed me to see connections between conflicts in other parts of the world that were not necessarily Islamic in nature.
To be fair, I think there will be some people, including those I worked with, who think I should have used more Islamic doctrine and culture as part of my analysis. A little bit of that type of analysis can be seen in chapter 5 of my book. But because I’m not an Islamic scholar, I was looking more for some of the sociological and social psychological reasons behind the war in Mindanao. For research that is more focused on Islam, or analyses of predominantly Islamic nations, I would recommend the works of Vedi Hadiz and Syed Farid Alatas.
Because I used an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary perspective that looked at definitions of emotions from diverse approaches—e.g., philosophical, biological, cultural—I think this analysis has relevance to a wide range of different types of conflicts throughout the world today, not just Islamic conflicts. At the end of my book, I tried to apply a racialized emotion analysis to the rise of Rodrigo Duterte, the first president from Mindanao, who is currently on trial for a bloody “war on drugs,” and who was notoriously anti-US and anti-women. Given the rise of xenophobic, sexist, and isolationist political rhetoric in many parts of the world today, I hope my book provides one example of how these topics could be studied from a racialized emotions lens.
I think it’s important that we see the throughline from colonial pasts to the postcolonial present and well into the 21st century. For instance, Singapore decriminalized sodomy in 2023, but for years the justification to keep the law on the books was that homosexuality was a “Western” lifestyle and that it had no place in an “Asian” society. Ironically, it was the British who introduced anti-sodomy laws to Singapore in 1938 precisely to protect Western colonial officers from being corrupted by supposedly wayward Asian sexual values. I’m currently working on a book chapter that looks at how Indonesia’s new criminal code, which criminalizes sex outside of marriage and cohabitation (a law that is often criticized as being anti-LGBTQ because same-sex couples cannot marry in Indonesia), is derived and influenced by old Dutch law. This is why it is so important that we decolonize institutions that reproduce values out of synch with the societies in which they were introduced.
While decolonizing institutions in nations that were once colonized is important, it is equally important to decolonize the institutions of the colonizer. The United States continues to maintain a legal system that has a long and troubled history with race, and as a result, has some deeply embedded racial biases within it. I discuss in my book how all were not “created equal” in the United States at the time the Philippines was colonized in 1898. Native Americans legally and institutionally experienced physical and cultural genocide up until the end of the 19th and well into the early 20th centuries. In the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1896, the Chinese were the first ethnic group to be prohibited from migrating to the United States. Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark Supreme Court decision that upheld Jim Crow segregation, was decided in 1896 and was not overturned until long after the Philippines gained independence. Given today’s concerns about the increasing use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement against communities of color and the Supreme Court deciding whether the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship for those born of non-citizens, these examples show how our legal institutions are not race-neutral and have been used and continue to be used to discriminate against people of color.
I hope that people read past the title and realize that the Philippines is not a strange or uniquely emotional country. All nations would respond to such dramatic historical events in emotional ways, albeit filtered through their own cultural and historical circumstances. If anything, I hope my book reminds readers of the common denominator that unites us all and that which makes us human—our emotional nature. Especially in an age dominated by AI, the capacities to feel, create, and express ourselves are uniquely human gifts.
To appreciate emotions is to understand and respect them, rather than ignore and control them. I hope my book encourages more attention to the role of emotions in political and social action, and that we spend more time studying its impact upon social action. Above all, I hope that readers appreciate the deep and rich history of the Philippines and how the history of the United States is intertwined with it.
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GEORGE BAYLON RADICS is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. After receiving his PhD in sociology from the National University of Singapore (NUS), he earned a juris doctor with a concentration in Asian law from the University of Washington and worked for the Supreme Court of Guam for two years. He is also a member of the New York Bar. His work involves the judicial system, notions of justice, human rights, minorities, and comparative legal studies, and his articles have been published in Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Journal of Human Rights, Current Sociology, and Philippine Sociological Review.
This interview was conducted by Fatima Mohie-Eldin. She is one of the social science editors at Choice.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
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