Emotional Filipinos  documents how in the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. I argue that these imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. Moreover, with the menacing rise of Islamic “terrorism,” political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism, conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a “failed state” or economic insecurity and cultural backlash. In this book, I explore emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, my book blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino “terrorist,” highlighting the lasting effects of America’s footprint in Southeast Asia.  My book is the culmination of over two decades of engagement with the Philippines and its southern islands of Mindanao.  It provides an analytical sociology of race and emotion lens, borne out of the Global South, to study other emerging conflicts throughout the world.