Tracy Borres is now the flavor of the month as far as viral blog posts go – and this is in the worst way possible. Borres is the alleged author of a now-controversial entry that discussed in detail the experience of going on an immersion program. Screen caps of the essay appeared on a certain Franco‘s Multiply account and have since been a lightning rod for comments and blog posts.
Smoke has actually saved all of us from the painstaking process of transcribing off the screen caps.
The gist basically is that Ms. Borres found the experience of having to live among the indigenous people of Zambales to be a very harrowing experience. She made countless remarks about how backward their way of living was and how inconvenient it was for her to be herself in a strange environment. Among the other talking points were the lack of hygiene of the Aetas and a few slurs that could have been intrepreted as having an almost racist slant.
I don’t know Tracy personally but I’m pretty sure that she wasn’t trying to get published in a magazine with this entry. If you look at the original captures, she wrote it on her Facebook Notes section which meant that the entry would’ve been only accessible to her friends in Facebook. She has probably lived a relatively comfortable life and being taken out of her comfort zone just totally shellshocked her out of her wits. The article seemed very honest, ditzy and it was apparent that there was an attempt to really emphasize the amount of struggle and grief that the author was going through.
Of course, ideally, we would’ve wanted everyone to be politically-correct and socially-aware of all the circumstances that face the vulnerable populations of the world but there are just people who were sheltered from those realities. Her Facebook page was her refuge. She wanted to vent out her frustrations by literally writing her experiences with out editing it for courtesy. What she wrote was never meant to be read by anyone other than her friends. Lessons in life are not realized instantaneously. Despite her not-so-favorable appraisal of the experience, her exposure to the plight of others could develop her world view into a more mature and responsible direction in the future.
Is it politically-correct to bitch about being out of one’s comfort zone? I think it’s pretty reasonable. Humans crave for normalcy and this drives them to build routines and structures that govern how they go about their lives. Feeling bad about something is something that you can’t really do much about. It’s just beyond a person’s control. Being uncomfortable and experiencing foul smells are experiences that only the observer can attest to. No one has the right to challenge it because these feelings and sensations are relative to the person who is experiencing it.
Obviously, feeling bad about/critical about something is not the issue here. Feelings can’t be helped. It’s either you feel it or you don’t. And besides, even if you feel that she had the “wrong feeling” for the occasion, it still doesn’t discount the possibility of her learning from his mistake.
Is it wrong to blog a harrowing experience in such a potentially offensive manner? This is where it gets really dicey. The thing is, it’s a Facebook Notepad. It’s not even considered a blog by most people. She wanted to share and dilute her sorrow (as trivial as it is to us who are veterans of the immersion process *cough*) by just gushing unadulterated rants on a space that was supposedly relatively private. She never wanted the whole world to know! Apparently, she’s not that much of an asshole.
So why are we crucifying her?
Is it because she’s an easy to target to pin all our frustrations regarding the socioeconomic inequality in the country? This girl is barely in here 20s for crying out loud. Ok, fine. What she did was reprehensible and she would probably regret the things that she wrote about the Aetas in the future. But what did the online condemnation against her turn into – a pissing contest between political correctness of students of School A and School B or a grand gesture of tough love meant to bash sense into an obviously immature and ditzy young lady?
It’s clear that people want to make an example out of her. The question then, is why? Is it to show that people who look down upon minorities will not be tolerated? Is the battle of hearts and minds is going to be won through driving a stake through the heart of every morally-reprehensible character and parading his/her corpse around the town square for everyone to see?
So there, Tracy. You’re an idiot, obviously. But what happened as a result of that post is just way over the top.
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I can't blame her. Everyone has the same tendency to write like that.
Ethnocentrism is relative. The aetas may had the same-degree of ethnocentrism against her, LOL.
Word.
I agree with your post by the way. The online reaction is far too excessive. (I guess people are still having withdrawal symptoms from Ms. Fernandez….)
If you read Tracy's posts, you'd see that the Aeta family treated her as well as they could given their humble means. The Aeta kids loved her, too. They most certainly did not show any sort of ethnocentrism towards her.
I would agree with aLps' view that there probably might have been a similar degree of ethnocentrism against her. The Aeta family she stayed with certainly doesn't have the internet access required for them to post a blog or journal describing their interaction with the daughter of well-to-do parents. I can say with utmost certainty that they would have made comments about her being different from them. (and this is universal: by simply being different, people will talk about it)
And that is really how it is with everyone. Even the most "politically-correct" person would have their own REAL views about other people, be those people socio-economically above or below them.
We all like to make "coño" jokes and poke fun at members of the upper classes, and honestly, in all of history and in the whole world, this has been common.
But it also been common for those who were reared in more comfortable environments to feel extreme discomfort when faced with "sub-standard conditions."
Just check out some of the entries (diary entries or memoirs) of some of the Thomasites who came to the Philippines and taught the natives. While many of them were well-meaning and had no intentions of demeaning the Pinoy natives, their diaries, meant for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant consumption back in the USA described conditions and levels of discomfort experienced by those Thomasites in degrees far worse than how Tracy described what she said.
Why is it always "ok" when lower classes make fun of the upper-classes, but wrong when the upper classes make candid observations and/or detail their experiences (esp. the uncomfortable ones) about their interactions with the lower-classes or those who are less modern? (in other words, those below are allowed to make fun of those "from above", but those above can't even complain about the discomfort they feel when they experience such discomfort amidst those "from below")
Tracy wasn't exactly making fun of the Aetas. She simply described what she experienced, and she was simply honest about it.
When we take political correctness to an almost absurd extreme, we will find that we also lose the ability to describe things as they are simply because we are too afraid to offend the sensibilities (or pretenses) of others.
The conditions she experienced are indeed appalling and "disgusting" and perhaps it would be good for all of us to see how much they lack the proper facilities of modernity that we enjoy if only to cause us to want to bridge that gap so that perhaps they may begin – at some point – to enjoy a better standard of living.
Too much emphasis on the external manifestations of political correctness, quite honestly, does have its negative effects on our ability to solve real-world problems, especially if political correctness gets translated into dampening the accuracy of real descriptions and pulling back on making an honest appraisal about a situation or a condition. We need the honest truth quite often, and that is the only way we can truly begin to try to solve the real problem without the blinders and sugar-coating.
Ateneo immersions are supposed to deepen a student's understanding of the human condition. They are purposely set in difficult circumstances to elicit reactions. I feel sorry for Tracy, sure. But only because her reactions showed lack of empathy and humanity.
Sure, we're all bigoted to a degree. What you call "political correctness" (such an American term) is really just the will to exhibit a bit of tolerance to the unfortunate, the alternative and the marginalized. You should know.
Although I agree with what most people here are saying regarding about the almost over-exaggerated response of the people. I still think that it was her fault.. cmon.. she mentioned it right? She was an hour and thirty minutes late for the orientation.. why? cause she was drunk. >>; geez…
Honestly, I think it's understandable that she has her opinions about the experience. (I'm not saying it's okay, but I understand why.) Obviously, she grew up in a different environment. Maybe it really is gross. Would you touch your friend's booger? (I doubt.) What makes her want to touch some kid's booger? And what if they really do stink? And what if they really were dirty? It probably was so.
And, let's face it, there's a certain amount in classism in all of us somehow. (Be honest. Some people won't want to be living in the mountains.) I wouldn't want some drunk taong-grasa to "hit on me" either.
I think what she has to work on is tactfulness and just learning what to say or post in public.
Well, that's just my opinion.
I feel sorry for her too. I'm not defending her, but she wrote really insensitive things, and I feel that she went way beyond her "bitching boundaries," but I don't like the way her private posts and pictures were spread this way throughout the web. It's just not right. Nobody deserves their privacy to be invaded like that.
which brings me to a question — is it a person's fault for being jaded?
couldn't care less for her post. it was more of "matter of fact" and personally wouldnt have given it more attention than it was due.
i think all the violent reactions were spawned from apparent lack of empathy. sure, it's natural to feel uncomfortable in an environment like that but it seemed as if she didn't understand why. it was a very selfish blog and that's what i'm reacting to, whether or not it was meant to be shared. it was a very callous way of looking at the world.
she is entitled to her opinion and the rest of the world is entitled to theirs. i was reacting just as "passionately" (or, maybe, dispassionately) as she reacted to her immersion experience.
but good for her if she really didn't mean some of what she said.
Sigh… when will kids ever learn? Nothing you post online is ever 100% private. If you want to post politically incorrect rants but can't handle the inevitable backlash, you should use a pseudonym.
Joyfulchicken says: Aetas are yucky. Yay!
the online reaction is "excessive" because Borres excessive.
Ah, so here it is.
So she bitched about it online. Big deal – a lot of people do, whether it's against OFWs, priests, aetas, coños or masochistic heiresses. She didn't like it, and let all her friends know about the horrid experience. Web 2.0 indeed, everyone's a reality star. So let's get over her, I just can't wait for the reaction of HR people to see her name in a stack of resumes.
[...] we’ve all grown to despise. On the other side of the fence are the semi-apologists like Atheista who feels that the backlash against this girl is somewhat [...]
[...] we’ve all grown to despise. On the other side of the fence are the semi-apologists like Atheista who feels that the backlash against this girl is somewhat [...]
Oooh she was? Tsk tsk.
Agree. She should have just expressed it to her friends vocally.
Mike Abundo seems to want to give everyone the impression that he has been initiating via blog a neutral and objective glimpse of the whole Tracy Borres mud party.
But his posts and comments, which have been everywhere and anywhere you can find Tracy's name, are all unambiguously riddled with adhominems and pre-suppositions.
I dont know the girl. But hasnt she suffered enough?
Those without sin cast the first stone.
Tracy is not naive but ignoramos, heartless and races.
ruben primor
1303 St. Jude Ave
New Iberia, LA 70560
USA
yeah. i feel the same way too. ganyan talaga sila.
cast a stone. sige lang. hanggang dyan lang naman sila.
they wouldnt even think kung papano makakatulong sa family na tinuluyan ni tracy.
every kid is kinda sick, and the community obviously needs help.
pero ang napapansin lagi ibang bagay. napaka-judgemental ng mga tao.
The Historical Roots of the Tracy Borres Phenomenon (or, am I the only one who feels that Tracy Borres and the reaction of the Filipino blogosphere are extremely revealing of Filipino [or Manilenyo] society?)
I’m sure you have encountered this question: how many years would it take a room with a million monkeys playing with million type-writers to produce Hamlet? Here’s another version: how long does it take for 6.9 million Filipinos in social networks to produce something that pisses off every other Filipino blogger (and offers an irresistible key word for the rest)?
Apparently, not too long. But an even more interesting question, I think, is WHY this particular blog post by some random college student hit a raw nerve in the Filipino blogosphere. I don’t think it was because she was being racist, offensive or shallow. I am absolutely certain that there are millions of blog posts out there which are much more offensive than this. And why would anyone care if some teenage girl wrote about Aetas being yucky? It would have been understandable if this were some public figure like Malu Fernandez. But Ms. Borres (unless I’m missing something here) is just another Ateneo student. Why is it that this one got the attention of Filipino bloggers and blog readers?
Perhaps it is because she hit too close to home. Mean humor can be funny when the victim is the Other. I'm sure you have laughed at an Erap joke (or jologs, conyo, bisaya, chinoy, dumb blonde, jew or nigger joke). But the joke ceases to be funny when you are the chinoy or the african american (unless it’s a fellow chinoy or nigga who is saying it… in which case, it ceases to be a mean joke and becomes a self-deprecating joke… yeah, humor could get really complex). Mean humor is extremely difficult to pull-off in the internet because it depends a lot on context, and there are gazillions of contexts among your readers in the internet.
I think this is what happened to the post of the girl. It could be funny given the proper context. But the venomous gut reactions that made this thing viral came from a context that considers this joke extremely offensive. I don’t think people were offended because a Manilenya dissed a Zambal. I think people were offended because the mean joke is too close to a fairly common experience in Manila (imagined or real): being looked down upon by your affluent peers, being the outsider in some exclusive world, being the “jologs” among “conyos.”
But I’m just a Bisaya immigrant to Manila, so I’m really just speculating. But what else explains the venom? I’m sure I would have felt offended if I did not know Manilenyos with the same type humor, or if I was less detached from the world of Manila. Yet, even with that, I was not able to escape the race and class anxieties that Manila generously offers. Being in the losing end of the social stratum really sucks, and I think Borres just reminds too many of us too well of that.
But if you think about the situation, it’s actually quite funny and says a lot about Manilenyo and Filipino society. It's so archetypal that you can substitute Borres with any other girl with parents who can afford Ateneo. The parents of that archetypal girl, wanting the best for her, tries to protect her all her life from “indigenous” culture, living in a gated community, sending her to schools inside walls, and perhaps even making sure their housemaid talk to her in English. When she reaches college, they pay for a course for her to be “immersed” in the world which they worked so hard to protect her from. This course was invented by the good Jesuits who have a preferential love for the poor. They see that their students are totally ignorant of the world right outside their village walls, and they try to bridge this educational gap with a program which tries to make them have real human contact with the poor (your choice: urban or tribal). The poor girls are right in the middle of all these, and they are surrounded by all sorts of expectations. While she is taught in church and in her Catholic school that to be happy is to do good, the rest of the time Hollywood and the local marketing industry is asking to be “liberated,” thin and white. Moreover, her parents expect her to behave well enough not to tarnish the family reputation, while her barkada expects her to be wild enough not to be a bore.
All these forces mix to produce a situation worthy of an Evenlyn Waugh satire (I'm dropping literary names for credibility). The parents just want to be good parents. Ateneo just wants to enlighten their students. And the girl is just being a good citizen to the different worlds she happens to belong to. The result is quite surreal. But it is so common that it looks normal. There's this girl brought up with Tellytubbies, Facebook, Jason Mraz and Gossip Girl, with a similar mindset as any other teenybopper from California, New Delhi, Warsaw or Hong Kong. She is transported to a society which has a lifestyle that probably hasn't changed much since the time of land bridges. Their lives are brought together by the forces of nationhood and academic requirements. Quite appropriately, the only thing that bridges them together is a love story in primetime TV between a normal guy (played by an actor named Dingdong) and a woman who is half fish from an underwater kingdom. The girl gets a culture shock (which is probably the purpose of immersion). She blogs about it. People get pissed. It becomes a phenomenon in Philippine blogosphere. What could be funnier?
But let's get back to the question that started this comment (which is already getting quite long). What are the roots of this phenomenon, the ultimate reasons why a blog post became so hated? I proposed above that the answer is that it opens the wounds of previous experiences of exclusion in Manilenyo society. But what are the roots of this common experience?
Years ago, when I was new to Manila, I got so interested in the concept of “jologs” that I made a “study” on it. I felt that to understand jologs is to understand the megacity of Manila. My conclusion is that “jologs” captures the perception of the educated middle-class of Manila (who are really the story-tellers of this city) on the poor and urban youth of the city. Creation of classes of people is a universal phenomenon but it varies among societies. It is probably worse in India with their centuries-old caste system, and it is probably less in the egalitarianism-obsessed USA. The only place I know well enough to use as a baseline is Cebu. And compared with it, Manila's class system is much more defined, and the walls between them are much more solid. There is no merit or fault in either city for this. It is just the result of historical circumstances. And the following are those historical circumstances which I think are the three roots of the jologs phenomenon. I think they are the same roots that prepared the ground for the Borres phenomenon.
1.There are 12 million people in Manila. A person can live his life in a “village” without making any real contact with people outside of it. You live in a village with people of the same background. You go to school with people of the same background. If you try hard enough, you can limit your friends and acquaintances to people you can share mean inside jokes with. This is simply because these sub-societies are big enough to exhaust one's social capacity.
2.A Manilenyo can cut-off ties with his poor relations. The population of Manila was decimated in WW2. Most of the Manilenyos, just like many megacities, are 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from the rest of the Philippines or China. If his parents or grandparents have made it, he can limit his social interactions with people whose parents or grandparents have also made it. He is free from that uncomfortable situation of being related to people who are the butt of jologs jokes.
3.Manila is still Intramuros. The societies in Manila are reincarnations of Intramuros. A Manilenyo's place in society is still defined on being in or out of walls—intramuros or extramuros. Blame Carlos Celdran for this perfect metaphor of Manila society.
So there you go. It seems the thing has reached its peak. So this is already a post-mortem. There's probably no moral in this story (except that we moralize too much and too quickly). But it has been interesting. Merry Christmas!
ewan ko ba. ang daming plastic sa mundo. sabihin na nating nagkamali siya sa paggamit ng salita pero mas maraming nang kupal sa kanya sa web. yung mismong may ayaw sa pananalita niya binanatan rin siya ng mga insensitive at condescending comments. sinong insensitive at condescending ngayon?
feeling ko mas mabuti sana kung sinulatan niyo etong tracy at yung ateneo para matulungan sila ma improve yung experience at yung program. kesa mang kupal kayo positive action na lang sana.
i just found out about this now because I myself went to the hinterlands of mindanao. this has caught my attention on all levels. i am a political economist by training, a probinsyana by background, and my profession has taken me to developing countries including Kenya where I have been exposed to the most severe of human conditions. i am saddened by tracy's lack of insight and plain stupidity. is our philippine education producing children like this now?
i dont think it's about her being a 19 year old because I have met people YOUNGER than her who have traveled to nairobi and built school houses for the masai tribe.
i dont think it's her parents because parents can only influence one so much and isn't it every teenager's angsty retort to not become her parents?
in my various reading of the issue, i see majority of the fault comes from those who have organized the immersion. the organizers have not taken into consideration tracy's background and certainly has not prepared her well enough to make her EXPECT the hardship she was going to encounter. indeed to encounter another way of life, one has to be open-minded, and to be open-minded, someone has to set a pre-requisite for it either by education, by example or both. i say ateneo should review its immersion program.
Do not focus on giving her the benefit of a comfort zone
The distressing part here is that we allow someone to be as spoiled as she is and get away with it. Ateneans, a group that could very well be the driving force of our country (as well as graduates from the other top schools) hold a lot of advantages. She'll probably be successful in life.
Now, there is something wrong with this.
Comfort zones are allowed to a certain extent, but not to degrade the dignity of people and culture.
Nalugi lang si Tracy na siya ang nahuli.
Am I the only one who doesn't know Tracy Borres? I was searching Tracy Torres, you know that semi-hot chick from the 90's and Tracy Borres' name came up. wtf?
I don't have time to read that long shit she wrote, as long as she is hot, I'll forgive her. From what I understand she signed up for this Ateneo immersion thing with the Aetas. But then she thought Aeta is short for Atenean in Zambales and thought this should be easy only to find out …oh forget it.
Here's my thing about that man for others shit of Ateneo. You would expect that chick to change her view in the world by letting her stay in some indigenous place and expect her to come out a totally different person, kumbayah and all. Ateneo, you have been teaching your students to become arrogant starting from the very arrogant ACET to the time they graduate. There is something wrong with your system.
Everyone has his or her own life to live, his or her own mind. Let it be.
Tracy Borres? Let her be. Mike Abundo? Let him be. Me? Let me be.
In short, we may not agree with what other people say, but let us not deny anybody's right to say it.
"Tracy Borres? Let her be. Mike Abundo? Let him be. Me? Let me be"
A common defense of error today is to say, with deep indignation, “I have a right to my opinion!” Legally this is true. But as G.K. Chesterton once said, “Having the right to do something is not at all the same as being right in doing it.”
There is no moral right to an immoral opinion – nor to one bred of emotionalism unconstrained by reason – nor to a deceitful one