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Singapore
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Linda Lim
Linda Lim

Opinion | On race, Singaporeans must open their eyes at home to thrive abroad

  • Living in a multicultural environment, Lion City residents have the opportunity ‘to see the world through the eyes of the other’, as corporate employers across the globe increasingly demand
  • But to do so, Singaporeans must first become wise to the realities of race in their own backyard

Reading Time:8 minutes
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School pupils in Singapore wear traditional costumes on Racial Harmony Day. Photo: Kevin Lim
Linda Lim

“The essence of racial privilege is that it is not recognised by the privileged themselves, since they assume that how they are treated is normal or standard for everyone, not having experienced anything different.”

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Thus was I instructed by my 30-something daughter, whose insights derive from being biracial (white and Chinese), dragged all over Asia by her parents growing up, but looking “mostly white” in adulthood, and living in the middle of a mostly white but increasingly diverse country, the United States.
Here, “white privilege”, once invisible or taken for granted, is now a matter of almost daily contention for whites and non-white people alike, whether on elite college campuses like mine, in demographic-data-driven election campaigns, or the dark corners of the internet accused of spawning the racial hatred that led to recent mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas.

But racial privilege is not unique to white countries, and the privilege itself is less about race than about power.

Friends gather at Singapore’s Newton Food Centre. Photo: Shutterstock
Friends gather at Singapore’s Newton Food Centre. Photo: Shutterstock
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Numbers are an important, but not only, part of the story. Growing up in an upper-middle-class, English-educated, Hokkien Chinese family in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s, I was a member of not only the majority race and its dominant dialect group, but also a self-confident socio-economic class.

Naturally, for us, “race didn’t matter” (unless you wanted to marry someone of a different race), for we had family and school friends and associates of all races – Chinese, Indian, Malay, Arab, Jewish, “European” (white) and Eurasian, even the occasional Burmese, Thai or Filipino. We were unaware of our own race factoring in our daily lives, and of racial considerations in how we ourselves viewed and treated others.

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