JULY 2 — No one has ever really produced a scientific basis for “race” and any serious scientific interest in the idea you can divide people into separate races didn’t endure much beyond the 50s.
There just isn’t a clear genetic or physiological basis for races; there has never been.
What we actually mean when we talk about race — particularly in the Singapore context — is ethnicity; the cultural, linguistic and social attributes that make one person Indian, another Chinese and another Malay.
Yet the distinctions aren’t as clear as you might think.
If you look at North East India or Nepal, for example, there are people who might be culturally Indian but look remarkably Malay or even Chinese.
So, let’s put “race” aside and focus on the one factor that really does differentiate us from each other: our colour.
We may not really belong to separate races but we are different colours and a universal tragic truth in our social order seems to dictate that the darker your colour, the worse things are for you.
Being dark is disgusting. We are told this all our lives.
It is something we learn from our first days in school. From my good friend — an eight-year-old Muslim child — who was mocked as Malay chu (the very derogatory “Malay pig” as Malay Muslims are forbidden to eat pork) by the school-bus driver in Singapore.
The disgust and hatred that stems from this perceived notion is such that it can motivate an adult in a position of caregiver for Singaporean school children to single out and terrify a little girl for daring to be darker and different.
That’s horrible but for so many minority Singaporeans, this is our entire lives.
And things aren’t gleaming across the Causeway either. This year’s Watson’s Hari Raya ad was an epic production featuring celebrities and a whole horde of cast and crew members plus an entire cabal of suits, every single one of whom watched the final product which places a black-face woman at the centre as the “ugly” and “pitiful” being who had to be saved and made beautiful by a whitening facial wash.
Yes, in 2017.
But considering that this bias is so deeply entrenched in human history maybe I am being idealistic in suggesting we could perhaps try to move past it.
For me, as a person of South Asian descent, the challenge begins at home because this bias is inter-racial and intra-racial. The persistent prejudice that fairer is better is unwavering.
This is why dark-skinned Asian mothers continue to counsel their daughters to stay out of the sun lest their already inferior skin colour gets darker. For a person to hope their child looks less like them is an innate and heartbreaking form of self-hatred.
It is the whitening products and that we are the butt of threats by parents frightening their kids into behaving with the spectre of the apu neh-neh.
Let’s call it what it is; fair-skinned privilege. A dark-skinned Chinese person is left to dream of being South Korean beautiful.
Weeks ago, over dinner, a group of friends and acquaintances (all different shades of brown) got to talking about race and racism in their individual conditions as Singaporeans and nearly all of us were in agreement that it does exist; it is persistent and the root causes are numerous.
All of us, except one.
A lovely middle-aged woman who kept insisting (much to everyone else’s disbelief) that she didn’t think racism existed in Singapore.
Of course, this is fine and we are all informed by our own experiences but watching her earnest denial and her offering that all her “Chinese” friends never minded that she was “Indian” made me acutely aware of the next clearest distinction between this woman and the rest of us.
She was fair to the point of white. Of North Indian descent, she could easily pass as European if she was moved to do so.
This conversation happened a couple of days after a video had spread on Singapore’s social media feeds showing a local man accosting a “foreigner” for talking too loudly on his phone. The victim of his self-righteous rage was a dark-skinned South Asian.
Of course, there are other dynamics at play here — xenophobia and class to name the main ones — but I posit that the local “hero” would have been a lot more reluctant to have attacked a well-dressed Chinese man for talking so loudly on his phone because a dark foreign worker is automatically assumed to be of low-status.
We infer status from skin colour.
And a state’s regulations can only reinforce this — the ministry of manpower services sector work permit requirements accepting only Chinese from the People’s Republic of China, North Asians (and Malaysians) is one puzzling way this happens.
The Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME) pointed out there was discrimination by nationality with South Asian workers earning significantly less than their counterparts.
Why are we trying to whiten everything from our underarms to our waiters? Because black is still seen as dark and dirty and because light skin still conveys real social and economic advantages — and because we as a society allow it to.
To quote the first post-racial person I ever encountered; I’m not going to spend my life being a colour.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
