Hong Kong must stop clinging to the fiction of racial superiority and treat foreign domestic helpers with respect

Anson Au says Hong Kong people’s racial prejudice against Filipino and Indonesian helpers must give way in the face of evidence that race is essentially a social construct

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Members of the Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body campaigning for a wage increase march past helpers congregating in Central on their day off. Photo: Felix Wong

Published: 10:01am, 16 Mar 2018Updated: 10:00am, 16 Mar 2018

The case of the Hong Kong employer who was jailed for abusing two domestic helpers, Tutik Lestari Ningsih and Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, was picked up by media outlets around the world and decried as an abuse of human rights.

Here, however, it was an addition to a long, silent history of the mistreatment of foreign domestic workers. Although the inequality that permitted such abuse is apparently economic and certainly political, it is rooted in the social: an age-old lens colours the way Hong Kong people look upon different races. Filipinos and Southeast Asian Muslims, many of whom work in Hong Kong as live-in carers, are stripped of equity.

Their congregations on the steps of Jardine House and neighbouring parks are the butt of many a joke and tolerated at best, but never fully accepted. Their disproportionately lower salaries, far below the poverty line, are justified as commensurate with their intelligence and education. Some of them learn Cantonese till they’re as fluent as natives, and many dedicate years of their lives to serving our households. For this, they may earn our praise, but never our acceptance – never enough to bridge the differences that nature has seemingly inflicted upon them at birth. Their complaints largely go unheard and are reacted to with calls to return home.

Behind the colour of our skin lie many assumptions: heritage, attitudes, dispositions, languages, identities

By contrast, Western foreigners are lauded as superior. They are descendants of a world praised in our homage to Hong Kong’s colonial origins – a hymn that gains strength in the contemporary calls for the United Kingdom to intervene in favour of Hong Kong independence. Consider also the push for students to obtain an education in Western universities and schools, touted since the 1980s as a superior source of truth and knowledge. A white-skinned instructor or tutor gives the impression of being able to provide a better education.

Marrying a white-skinned partner is traditionally seen as a necessary improvement to one’s social standing and status. West is best.

The core beliefs behind both perspectives are the same: that social differences are inherent to race and that race is immutable, obvious and stamped onto the shade of one’s skin. Behind the colour of our skin lie many assumptions: heritage, attitudes, dispositions, languages, identities. This ideology hides an uncomfortable and not-so-obvious truth: that race itself is a social construct.

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Just last month, researchers at the London Natural History Museum recreated the appearance of Cheddar Man, famously Britain’s oldest complete skeleton dating back over 10,000 years. He was what we would today call black, shattering commonly held beliefs that British people have always been, are, and will be white. Tom Booth, an archaeologist who worked on the project, said: “It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all.”