10 Quotes by Matt Ortile

Loneliness can feel like what's private has been made public, as if your belly button has come undone and your liver, lungs, and beating heart have spilled onto the sidewalk.

To counter that 'all lives matter' is to dismiss the specificity of antiblack racism, how the gradations of violence inflicted on nonwhite bodies is dependent on the darkness or lightness of our skin.

Unlearning the colonialism I was taught, the stories I've been told and I've told myself, is a daily practice, like learning a new language. You learn it by watching films, listening to the radio, reading books. Your ear gets attuned to it. You pick up the vocabulary, learn the system's grammar and mechanics. From there, you can understand and deconstruct it. Sure, learning a language is a solo task, but it helps to have conversation partners.

Colonization works by cutting off peoples from their own heritage-be it traditions or languages, orthographies or names...They taught us Spanish for the same reason Americans taught us English: to homogenize colonial subjects under one tongue, one fist. ("You're in America," we're told-not only as immigrants to the US but as erstwhile property of the American empire. "Speak English.")

As Las Islas Filipinas, Spain placed us into castes based on how Spanish one's blood was, colorism by DNA. It's why Filipino pop culture today still puts light-skinned celebrities on a pedestal (just look at our Miss Universe winners.)

Our clothing, our bodies, and even our names were reframed as inferior to those of our colonizers.

The term 'mestizo,' in the Philippines today, refers to mixed race filipinos, often those who have a white parent. the term, and the beauty standards that follow, were passed down to us over three centuries of Spanish colonization. Mestizos dominate the media landscape...In short, Filipinos, myself included, look to lightness to know what to desire.

Immigrants and people of color are forged in such fires, shaped by heat and pressure. But in my four years at Vassar, I was chosen to be privileged. As a model student and Asian American, I never risked getting burned.

Like most Filipino immigrants I knew, I traded my accent for class anxiety.