ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the palpable struggle to both manage stigma and maintain respect. The Filipino migrants are self-identified as 'middle-class' are university-educated, work in professional white-collar jobs and hold managerial roles. The chapter discusses how middle-class whiteness in the Australian context intersects with the system of whiteness within which Filipino migrants are implicated as a result of the Philippines' colonisation. Honorary whiteness implies a state of suspended fantasy in which "privilege is tentative rather than absolute". Filipino middle-class migrants may access the economic dimensions of white privilege through socio-economic mobility; however, they continue to encounter exclusion or marginalisation based on racial and ethnic markers ascribed as either physical and/or cultural difference. Social mobility makes available the same kinds of material and symbolic concessions accessible to the white middle class and enables the reworking of racially stigmatised identities. Accumulating varying forms of valued cultural and economic capital gives Filipino middle-class migrants something to leverage and exchange.
