SEPTEMBER 13 — The television documentary Regardless of Race, shown on Channel NewsAsia in the middle of last month, has made me think about how race relations in Singapore today are different from the past and what we can do to reduce prejudice.

Minister of State for Communications and Information as well as Education Janil Puthucheary, who hosted the documentary on racial prejudice and harmony, was excellent as the "TV journalist” — passionate, knowledgeable and sensitive about the subject.

However, one of my concerns about the show was the way the producers constructed the conversation about racial prejudice and about the possible ways to achieve harmony. There was a test about racial prejudices through a quiz, and getting people to take steps back and forth in another quiz-like game to test or prove the extent of their bias or privilege. These somehow turned it into a reality show of sorts.

The documentary could have been more authentic if it had not skirted around the problem of racial prejudice and examined the experiences of the pioneer generation.

Let me elaborate. Most seniors like me lived with racial differences, whether it was in a rural kampung in Sembawang, or an urban one like Queen Street where I grew up in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Unlike today, we knew we had racial differences and did not hide them. We could not, even if we wanted to, because the kampung was an open neighbourhood. We grew up and went to school together — Chinese, Indians, Malays, Eurasians, Sikhs and the odd Filipino family — neighbours all. We played, and ate together. We visited each other’s places of worship regularly.

In all the important things that we did, we knew and accepted our racial and religious differences openly. Unlike today, where differences are more likely to be synonymous with prejudice, we regarded our ethnic diversity as preferences, accepting literally, for instance, that our Chinese neighbour’s meat was our Malay neighbour’s poison.

We used humour to air and dissolve our prejudices because we knew it was more productive to share our common interests than quarrel over our differences.

My Chinese neighbours would poke fun at my skin colour and my Indian friends and I would counter that by ribbing them on their lack of manliness for being unable to sport a decent moustache. Our Malay neighbours would good-naturedly remind our Chinese neighbours to sit farther off because pork was an inevitable item in Chinese meals.

Instead of taking offence, we laughed about these things. It is hard to imagine such honest public exchanges today, which may be why people pay good money to watch comedians reprise them.

Once we were done with the ethnic jibes, we would sit at the same table to enjoy a singular conversation about everything under the sun while dining on different meals. Dessert was the unifying dish: Unsold rojak donated by our rojak seller (yes, that famous Waterloo Street street vendor).

If harmony was so prevalent, you may ask, how does one explain the outbursts of ethnic tumult then, like the horrid racial riots in 1964?

In a way, the riots prove my point. It did not arise because neighbours turned against each other. It was instigated by outsiders, zealot politicians from across the Causeway. What these race-based baiters did for political ends is no different from how the Islamic State is trying to infiltrate and destroy our multiracial fabric now.

Here was how that racial riots affected my Queen Street neighbourhood: During their checks, a team of federal riot police officers dispatched by Kuala Lumpur to Singapore visited our neighbourhood. They expected trouble but were shocked to see us — Malays, Chinese and Indians — sitting together, joking and living harmoniously.

One surprised officer asked us why we were behaving so peacefully. In bazaar Malay, we replied "kita satu hati” (we are united), because we lived together and always had each other’s backs.

Tackling racial prejudice from the bottom up

Today, racial prejudice festers because each community has taken it private, out of the public space, bottled it in and reinforced it within its own community.

Racial prejudice breeds today among the whispers, musings and amplification of stereotypes and wrongs perceived when members of one community gather, out of the earshot of other communities. That is the danger that is not being addressed by each community, and I hope the media will address this.

The antidote is to accept and celebrate our ethnic differences, and have personal intermingling in a natural, public setting. These were actively prevalent in my generation but have been either disfigured or diluted by intra-communal prejudices.

In many instances, they are now evoked or concocted artificially, instead of being conceived naturally in living rooms and common spaces where people of different races gather.

Social media, while useful in other ways, has mainly worsened the situation because it offers freedom of expression without personal responsibility or consequences. Mainstream media may have its shortcomings, but the conversations are considered and not emotive like on social media.

My generation achieved racial harmony because we tackled prejudice from the bottom up, not vice versa as the case seems to be today, with disproportionate work being borne by the government.

The People’s Association may be doing its best, but its efforts are not a substitute for the genuine harmony my generation developed because it was personal for us, not contrived.

Racial harmony was natural then because it was conceived from the rhythms of daily life. Prejudice was calmed by a responsible media, not stoked by the emotive anonymity of social media.

Racial harmony sprang from a recognition and celebration of — and not a retreat from — our racial and religious differences. Racial differences were accepted as a positive preference, and tool for multicultural unity, not the purveyor of prejudice.

Here is a recent example to show the difference between self-censoring ethnic differences and celebrating them. In the documentary, Dr Puthucheary started one interview by asking the interviewee about her race.

To older Singaporeans, this may seem like a natural question. Yet, the interviewee took offence, saying that it was no one’s business, suggesting that the question hints of racism. Then, without a trace of irony, the interviewee bemoaned the state of heightened over-sensitivity today which blocked an honest discussion about racial prejudice.

In contrast, the late former Singapore President of Singapore, SR Nathan, embraced his ethnicity openly. During his funeral last month, his family shared his favourite Tamil melody with all Singaporeans.

It would have taken an ultra-stoic Tamil heart not to shed tears because the song speaks to the soul of the Tamil community and other Indians familiar with the culture. By playing the tune openly, Nathan’s family shared his ethnic heritage not only with fellow Indians, but with the entire country in a positive, personal way.

In my view, a good place to start is to share our ethnic differences openly, recognise and embrace them as preferences, not prejudice. By all means, make use of foreign ways to identify prejudices or import political correctness, but I would also say that if we wish to reinvent the wheel of racial harmony, we can do it even better with the cultural tools of my generation. — TODAY

* Ravi Govindan is a retiree who spent his career in logistics in a Singapore-based American multi-national company.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.