Breaking out of Singapore’s little boxes

As Singapore approaches its semi-centennial birthday, contestations over its history make apparent that the Singapore Story is possibly tainted with irony. Multiculturalism is a prime example.

In 2012, citizens had strongly chastised one Amy Cheong for denigrating the Malays for their “50 bucks” weddings at the void deck. However, most did not bat an eyelid when told that the very same ethnic group is prone to divorce. For many, Ms Cheong was seen to be shooting her mouth off, making her views sound like the product of a prejudiced mind. Meanwhile, the high divorce rates of the Malays are based on facts. Thus, the former can be discounted, but the latter should be taken seriously.

However, both events end up sharing the same malicious conclusion: The Malays are the malaise.

Here lies what is perhaps Singapore’s greatest impediment to harmony — its obsession with “little boxes”. By this, I mean the overbearing impulse to reduce complex human identities to neat categories. Such an impulse has expressed itself most stridently in social tensions about ethnicity and gender.

This is not a uniquely Singaporean flaw if we consider the curious case of Mr Ben Affleck. The actor was quick to cry bigotry when United States television host Bill Maher accused Muslims of acting like the Mafia early this month. However, Mr Affleck was himself responsible for depicting Iranians as a predominantly angry lot in his 2012 film, Argo. Both instances will appeal to anyone with an Islamophobic palate.

We see the actor playing the contradictory roles of defender and oppressor. The same can be said of some members of Singapore’s citizenry, who may speak out against bigotry, but also peddle prejudice, often unwittingly.

In this sense, while it is tempting to place the blame squarely on policymakers, it is highly plausible that even common folk are complicit in reproducing Singapore’s obsession with “little boxes”. This is congruent with what the French philosopher Michel Foucault observes of how “power” operates in a society — that is, it is not only produced at the top, but also from the bottom. Power is everywhere. Let us now consider details, in which the devil lurks.

WHY RACIALISM IS A BIGGER ISSUE THAN RACISM

Singapore is undergoing a metamorphosis when it comes to ethnic harmony. The spectres of the 1964 and 1969 race riots may haunt certain members of Singapore’s founding generation who insist on maintaining the C-I-M-O model — representing Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others — as the panacea to ethnic harmony.

However, there has been a groundswell of criticism of this very move if recent focus group discussions on race conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies can be taken as an indication. Here, researchers captured doubts about the C-I-M-O model, especially by younger Singaporeans.

Amid all this, one nuance has not yet been fleshed out — the distinction between racialism and racism.

Racism is a malicious practice that dehumanises people on the basis of skin colour. It can be clearly identified as hate speech. Racialism, meanwhile, appears rational and practical. It posits that races have essential traits proven by empirical evidence such as education performance and health indicators. Thus, racialism categorises people neatly into manageable “boxes”.

While both are fuelled by stereotypes, racism can be called out, but racialism not quite. It is for this reason that racialism is a bigger issue than racism in Singapore.

One need not look further than Singapore’s ethnic-based self-help groups for evidence of racialism.

Such groups are informed by a bevy of race-centric surveys. Here, the Malays stand to lose the most given that these surveys show them to be the most problem-riddled. However, they also gloss over the possibility that social issues — be it drug abuse, dysfunctional families or obesity — are the result of income inequality and not genetics or culture.

Therefore, racialism cultivates a ghetto mentality that is contrary to Singapore’s founding principle of harmony. If we stubbornly stick to this reasoning, then we are staring at a society where the Malays will forever be the malaise.

Ethnic Indians too bear the brunt of racialism if we consider the aftermath of last year’s Little India riot. The banning of alcohol in an area popular with migrant South Asian workers feeds into the trope of the “drunken Indian”, yet another derogatory stereotype that can be justified by empirical evidence.

In colonial Malaya, the British had ensured that toddy, or alcohol made from coconut or palm oil, was readily available to plantation labourers from South India. As addiction set in among these workers, toddy thus became their “bait and bondage”, as the sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas puts it in the seminal work The Myth Of The Lazy Native. Here, history has narrated a “trait” of the ethnic Indians.

In a similar fashion, Singapore’s gender trouble is also the product of “little boxes”. Consider the reactions to the Focus on the Family Singapore’s relationship workshop following Hwa Chong Institution student Agatha Tan’s complaint of sexism.

Jumping to the Christian charity group’s defence, some argued for upholding traditional gender roles. It is not passe to uphold differences between men and women, they say. It is biological. After all, how can something that made sense for thousands of years be wrong? This very question suggests that gender fixity works similarly to racialism — it seeks to validate “little boxes”through the manipulation of facts.

However, gender roles have never been fixed. Figures such as England’s Queen Elizabeth and the French soldier and Catholic saint Joan of Arc from medieval Europe, as well as the political leader and scholar A’isha and the entrepreneur Khadijah in the Islamic tradition, are examples of “masculine” women from ancient times.

The case of modern South-east Asia is just as compelling. While Singaporean children must follow their father’s race and religion, the Indonesian tribe of the Minangkabau practises a form of property inheritance by way of the female lineage. Other gender-bending instances abound.

In other words, men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. They are both from Earth. For breaking out of boxes, Ms Agatha Tan was not naive, but well beyond her years. Can we do the same?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nazry Bahrawi is a lecturer at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and a research fellow at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.