Mixed Race Studies

S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids

The Straits Times
Singapore
Forum Letters
2013-03-16

Peter Wadeley

MRS MARIETTA Koh Ai-meng (“Citizens have every right to expect privileges”; last Saturday) claims that rising consciousness of what it means to be Singaporean should not be decried as chauvinistic or jingoistic.

Last year, former president S R Nathan said that a clear Singaporean identity has yet to develop (“Building a S’porean culture takes time, says ex-president”; March 18, 2012).

Whenever such an identity is formed, it must be broad enough to include all Singaporeans, without distinction of race.

My children are Singaporean, have lived here their whole lives, and speak Singlish and Chinese. Most importantly, they identify themselves as Singaporean.

But as they are “only” half Chinese and look different from other children, they are, regrettably, treated accordingly…

Read the entire letter here.

That’s How It Goes: Autobiography Of A Singapore Eurasian

Select Books
2008
235 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9789814022392

F. A. C. “Jock” Oehlers

These memoirs by a member of one of Singapore’s leading Eurasian families offers many sidelights onto Singapore’s life in the mid-20th century. The author, then a dental student, tells of the hardships of his life with a young family at the Japanese-enforced agricultural settlement for Eurasians at Bahau, Negri Sembilan. He tells of his career as an oral surgeon at the University and in private practice, his involvement with the development of the Singapore Kennel Club until his 1990 retirement to Perth, West Australia. With black-and-white photographs.

Racing ahead, going nowhere

Very Fine Commentary
2011-04-17

Yoong Ren Yan, Editor

Are we running around in circles with our policies on race?

Racism is bad. What more is there to say?”

It may not have been the case just 50 years ago in the time of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, but in today’s world, being against racism is rather unremarkable. Part of the reason Nelson Mandela is such a universally revered figure is because his cause is no longer controversial. Those that are the least bit racist are promptly and collectively refuted, and with good reason: racism is not only astoundingly irrational, but also one of the worst forms of injustice humans have ever inflicted on others.

Yet there is more to the issue of race. Our insistence that people not be judged based on their skin has not extended to consensus on how to achieve that end. While we all agree that racial discrimination, exploitation and conflict should be things of the past, there are, broadly, two contradictory visions for the future. Which of these should be pursued, and by what means, are sources of unrecognised controversy, and therefore deserve further debate.

More is not better

Singapore represents one of these cases. The Singaporean model is encapsulated in our national obsession with ‘multi-’: we are taught that our nation is multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual. We present ourselves as a rojak society, a mix of different cultures and ethnicities whose flavours blend into a single dish. Our government is committed to ‘racial harmony’, and envisages Singapore’s four races coexisting peacefully, accepting one another’s differences and working together to build a nation.

For a country that not so long ago was mired in communal violence, division and mutual mistrust, Singapore has made notable progress. It is a prime example of multi-racialism. It has succeeded with two parallel strategies: firstly, to group the population into CMIO (Chinese Malay Indian Others); and secondly, to encourage, and where necessary enforce, cohesion amongst these four races. This approach has manifested itself in our policies on language (English first, no dialects), education (English-medium schools), housing (the Ethnic Integration Policy), social security (ethnic self-help groups) and even the media (censorship, the Sedition Act).

Yet, as Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew constantly reminds us, our multi-racial society is still fragile and vulnerable, and could just unravel if we become complacent. In a world stricken with ethnic conflict, his words resonate. But in some senses, Singapore’s drive to become multi-racial has sown the seeds of subterranean tension by continuing to entrench notions of race in society, just at a time when such notions are gradually fading away. Instead of allowing the winds to blow over our divisions, multi-racialism deepens the lines in the sand and widens our already narrowing differences.

This is exemplified by Racial Harmony Day, an attempt to promote cohesion by showcasing the four nationally-sanctioned cultures. Exposure to cultural differences may have been useful in our formative years, but today, a day that celebrates differences rather than similarities and inculcates the notion of race in our children from a young age seems rather anachronistic. Worse yet, divergent racial identities are enforced even when these identities have become far fainter over the years. The result is a farce where Singaporeans put in the special effort to buy cheongsams or learn how to play the angklung on Racial Harmony Day to fit into the race and culture of which they are supposedly a part…

…In concentrating on multi-racialism, our strategies have obstructed society from becoming less race-conscious, which has artificially perpetuated the existence of race in Singapore, with its attendant tensions and clashes. It is difficult enough to encourage integration. If society spontaneously turns away from race, why should the government stick obsessively to its multi-racial stance?…

Read the entire article here.

Multiple Realities: Reconsidering Multiracialism in Singapore

World Scientific Publishing
Summer 2012
150 pages
ISBN: 978-981-270-604-1; 981-270-604-6

Eugene K. B. Tan, Assistant Professor of Law
Singapore Management University, Singapore

How has Singapore’s multiracialism policy evolved, and how has it impacted on ethnic relations and nation-building in a secure, yet perpetually vulnerable, Singapore? This important book addresses these important questions through a critical analysis of ethnic markers in key facets of Singaporean life, such as elections and race quotas in public housing, national service, ethnic self-help groups, the rise of “Chineseness” and increased religious piety. The author challenges the conventional wisdom that multiracialism in Singapore is unequivocally race-blind or nonethnic in its approach. Instead, he argues that Singapore is an ethnic-conscious state wherein race, culture and language are instrumentally mobilized as key resources in nation-building and political governance. This could have potentially ethnic/racial enhancing or polarizing effects, thus undermining the stability of the multiracial framework in Singapore.

Contents:

• Introduction — The Multiple Realities of Multiracialism
• Race and Multiracialism as a Mode of Governance in Singapore
• Institutionalizing Multiracialism: The Legal, Institutional Framework and the Periodization of Ethnic Relations
• Electoral Politics: Electing Race Consciousness?
• The Citizen’s Army: The Dilemmas of Faith, Loyalty and Citizenship
• The Essence of Self-Help and the Dilemmas of Ethnic Essentialism
• Multiracialism and the Growing Assertion of Chineseness: Ethnic Consciousness as a Cultural Resource
• The Specter of Religious Extremism: Veiled Threats, Fearful Faithful Piety and Enlarging the Common Space
• The Impoverishment of Multiracialism: The Lack of Shared Institutions
• Conclusion: The Way Ahead

Envisioning Chinese Identity and Managing Multiracialism in Singapore

International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference
2009-10-18 through 2009-10-22
Coex, Seoul, Korea
9 pages

Leong Koon Chan, Associate Professor
School of Design Studies
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Multiracialism and bilingualism are key concepts for national ideology and policy in the management of Singapore for nation building. Multiracialism is implemented in social policies to regulate racial harmony in the population of Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other, a social stratification matrix inherited from the British administration. Bilingualism—the teaching and learning of English and the mother tongue in primary and secondary schools—is rationalised as the ‘cultural ballast’ to safeguard Asian identities and values against Western influences. This focus on ‘culture’ as a means of engendering a relationship between the individual and the nation suggests that as a tool for government policy culture is intricately linked to questions of identity. In discussing multiracialism it is necessary to address ethnicity for the two concepts are intertwined.

This paper investigates the crucial role that imagery plays in our understanding of nationalism by examining the policy and process of language reform for the Chinese in Singapore through the visual culture of the Speak Mandarin Campaigns, 1979-2005. Drawing upon object analysis, textual/document analysis and visual interpretation, the research analyses how the graphic communication process is constructed and reconstructed as indices of government and public responses to the meanings of multiracialism and Chineseness.

Central to the findings are Anthony D. Smith’s (1993) contention that “national symbols, customs and ceremonies are the most potent and durable aspects of nationalism,” and Raymond Williams’ (1981) contention that social ideologies are reflective of “structures of feeling”, defined as individual and collective meanings and values, “…with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension…a social experience which is still in process.”

Read the entire paper here.

It’s dual-race for 1 in 6 babies of mixed parentage

The Straits Times
Singapore
2012-01-11

Amanda Tan

One in six newborn babies of mixed parentage was registered as having a double-barrelled race last year after a new policy kicked in allowing parents to do so.

This full-year figure, released for the first time to The Straits Times, comes a year after the policy was implemented in January last year.

The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) said 16 per cent of mixed-race babies born last year were recorded as being of dual race…

Read the entire article here.

Multiplicity within Singularity: Racial Categorization and Recognizing “Mixed Race” in Singapore

Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs
Volume 30, Number 3 (2011)
pages 95-131
ISSN: 1868-4882 (online), ISSN: 1868-1034

Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

“Race” and racial categories play a significant role in everyday life and state organization in Singapore. While multiplicity and diversity are important characteristics of Singaporean society, Singapore’s multiracial ideology is firmly based on separate, racialized groups, leaving little room for racial projects reflecting more complex identifications. This article explores national narratives of race, culture and belonging as they have developed over time, used as a tool for the state, and re-emerging in discourses of hybridity and “double-barrelled” racial identifications. Multiracialism, as a maintained structural feature of Singaporean society, is both challenged and reinforced by new understandings of hybridity and older conceptions of what it means to be “mixed race” in a (post-)colonial society. Tracing the temporal thread of racial categorization through a lens of mixedness, this article places the Singaporean case within emerging work on hybridity and recognition of “mixed race”. It illustrates how state-led understandings of race and “mixed race” describe processes of both continuity and change, with far-reaching practical and ideological impacts.

Introduction

“Race” and racial categories have long played a significant role in everyday life and state organization in Singapore. From colonization to independent statehood, narratives of racial distinctiveness and classification underpinned Singapore’s development at macro and micro levels. While multiplicity and diversity are important characteristics of contemporary Singaporean society, Singapore’s multiracial ideology is firmly based on separated, racialized groups, leaving little room for more complex individual and institutional racial projects. However, hybridity and “mixed race” are increasingly important characteristics and identifications in Singaporean society, and in fact have historically provided an important thread linking colonial and postcolonial national identifications. This article traces the emergence of mixed identities against a background of racial structuring in Singapore, moving from colonial understandings of race towards the recent state-led efforts at recognizing hybridity: acknowledging ancestral and personal complexity within a singular racial framework…

…Mixedness, Diversity and Identity

In contrast to the neat delimitations of the census, colonial Singaporean society was diverse and complicated, made up of interacting groups that blurred at the edges. The Peranakans, otherwise known as Babas and Nonyas, or Straits Chinese, provide a good example of this complexity, as an ethnic group which traced its descent to seventeenth century Chinese migrants who married local women in Southeast Asia (Beng 1993; Stokes-Rees 2007). Characterized by Chinese and Malay influences and inflected by European and Indonesian customs, Peranakan (meaning “descendent” in Malay) culture illustrated the fusion and intermingling of cultures in everyday life (Goh 2008a: 237).

In keeping with the eurocentric understanding of racial hierarchy, much intermixing (particularly inter-Asian intermixing, as in this case) was left unrecorded and unremarked. It was the intermixing between Europeans and Asians that was of greater concern to the colonial authorities (Stoler 1992), reflecting the gendered and racialized bases for colonialism. Of concern was the fact that despite practical and prejudicial limitations, as in all of Europe’s colonies, relationships between the colonizers and the colonized produced offspring: children of “mixed race”, who transgressed the ostensibly fixed racial lines demarcated by the administration (Pomfret 2009).

Individuals of mixed European and Asian descent in Singapore were known as Eurasians. Interestingly, Eurasians were among the earliest migrants to Singapore after 1819, coming from regions with an established European presence, such as Goa, Malacca, Macau and Timor (Braga-Blake 1992; Pereira 2006). Eurasians were frequently classified as European due to similarities in style of dress, custom and religion, and as such were accorded higher socio-economic status, often working in the civil service and in higher ranking jobs (Braga-Blake 1992; Pereira 1997). As greater numbers of Europeans arrived after 1869, this privileged position became more precarious (Pereira 2006). Eurasians continued to occupy an intermediate position, between the “local” population and the British colonizers in terms of employment, education and socio-economic status, but a firmer line was drawn between European and Eurasian – effectively limiting social interaction and employment prospects, but maintaining a certain privilege (Braga-Blake 1992)…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Realities: Social Constructs and the Stuff of Which They Are Made

Global Dialogue
Volume 12, Number 2 (Summer/Autumn 2010)—Race and Racisms

Eric C. Thompson, Associate Professor of Sociology
National University of Singapore

How can we deny the reality of race? It is a truth so many hold to be self-evident. Travel around the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to South America: people look different in different places. Travel about in major global cities—Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London—and physical diversity is close at hand. It would seem absurd to argue that the visible differences so apparent to our sight are socially constructed. Physiological differences—skin tone, eye shape, hair texture and the like—are not the outcome of our human imagination. The material reality of physiological differences grounds racial categorising. It is used as a point of reference and point of realisation to assert rhetorically the undeniable truth of any given scheme of racial categorisation.
 
The purpose of this article is to emphasise the error of such assertions. I aim also to point out the weakness of arguments for the “social construction” of race, which too often undermine their own case by denying the material reality of visible difference. I outline instead a way to incorporate the material reality of biological difference into an understanding of race as a social construct. My argument is simply this: biological difference is the material out of which our concepts of race are fashioned. These concepts are as many and varied as the diverse cultures of human societies around the world. In the case of race and other identities—such as ethnicity, gender and class—our social constructs are not fashioned out of thin air but out of material conditions. This said, the material conditions do not determine what we make of them—what we construct socially—any more than wood determines the myriad things a woodworker or craftsman might make out of a piece of timber.
 
In the first section of this article, I want to emphasise the socially constructed nature of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The idea that race is a sensible way to talk about the material reality of biologically inherited diversity continues to reappear in new forms despite our best efforts to teach students and colleagues about its socially constructed nature. The attempt to depoliticise such concepts, to make them function as objective categories in the service of science or medicine, is a fraught undertaking. Race and ethnicity are deeply political categories, as many investigations into the historical circumstances of their social construction demonstrate. I will discuss this history in general ways in the case of the United States and in some greater detail in the internationally less well-known case of Malaysia, with the development of the concepts of bangsa in Malay and minzu in Chinese, which map varyingly and imperfectly onto the English terms “nation”, “race” and “ethnic group”. The imperfection of translation across Malay, Chinese and English itself demonstrates the tenuous relationship between these signifiers of types of peoples and the various extra-linguistic referents—of biology and culture—through which attempts are made to ground and reify such concepts as “race” and “ethnicity”.
 
But I also wish to move beyond this by now well-worn understanding of the social construction of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The problem with social constructionist arguments, usually raised to try to dismiss racial, ethnic and other identities as ephemeral, is that they generally have no answer to the naive—though by no means foolish—realist reference to the difference and diversity of physical features, thought and behaviour which seem so true and apparent. There are people who look different from one another in patterns we map onto “racial” difference and who act differently in ways we attribute to cultural or ethnic difference. In response, I want to provide a means by which to take this sensible reality (i.e., a reality apparent to our senses) into account, to bring it into our understanding of the social construction of race, ethnicity and the like, while still maintaining the argument that biology and culture by no means determine such categories. Rather, biology and culture merely provide the raw materials from which we socially construct ideas of difference and community. As with raw materials out of which we fashion buildings or clothing, the materials we rely on have some bearing on the structures we build or the fashions we weave out of them, but they do not determine the form of the final products, let alone the uses to which we put them…

…Compare this to the United States. Barack Obama is widely considered to be America’s first “black” president. The default categorisation of racial identity in America, with Obama and others, is to classify individuals of “mixed” white and minority parentage as belonging to the minority category. In Singapore, by contrast, racial classification is a patrilineal inheritance: at birth, a child’s race is recorded as being that of the father. In the United States, President Obama is considered black or African American primarily on a biological, not a cultural, basis. But while physical appearance derived from biological inheritance may be the main touchstone of race in America, and cultural traits may be the main standard for race (or ethnicity) in Malaysia, in both countries these two race signifiers are also greatly conflated and combined. Obama, for instance, has been scrutinised for his language, mannerisms, sports preferences and, most prominently and perversely, his religious affiliations, all as a measure of how “black” or how “American” he is. Similarly, in Malaysia, although “Malay”, “Chinese” and other racial categories are associated more strongly with cultural traits, including language and religion, than with biological traits, the latter are frequently invoked when it suits a particular cause. For example, the former long-serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, known as a vocal proponent of the Malay community and head of the politically dominant United Malay National Organisation, was nevertheless alleged by some political opponents to be of paternal Indian biological lineage and therefore not to be a “real Malay”…

Read the entire article here.

The Rulers and the Ruled: the Singapore Eurasian Community Under the British and the Japanese

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
1999
DS610.25.E87 Con

John Gregory Conceicao

Mixed-race populations provide a challenging and fascinating subject for historical enquiry as they blend multiple cultures and, in the process, give rise to unique social and political forces. This thesis focuses on the Eurasians of Singapore, a distinct and disparate social group which arose from Singapore’s strategic location as an entreport that attracted Europeans from diverse backgrounds. As an ethnic group, the Eurasians were perhaps one of the earliest among the domiciled communities to look upon Singapore as their home and to develop a stake in the Colony, which had essentially been a place for travellers, transients and sojourners. This study focuses on the Eurasians and the complex relationships they forged with their two colonial overlords, the British and the Japanese, in the period prior to 1946.

Under the British the Eurasians played a ‘middleman’ role vis-a-vis other Asiatic communities and, by doing so, obtained unique privileges. However, in the 1870s a point was reached when owing to changing circumstances and attitudes, the British began to adopt a less than favourable stance towards the Eurasians. While the British needed their support for political and economic reasons in order to run the administration of the Colony, they adopted a policy that vacillated between patronage and prejudice. This left the Eurasians in a difficult position as they were staunchly pro-British yet, confused at the disinterest displayed by their patrons. Without much success, the Eurasians tried to redefine privilege to mean rights, and to have a voice in running the affairs of a place they regarded as their home.

The onset of the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War deepened the Eurasian predicament. They were singled out by the Japanese authorities for political indoctrination and subjected to measures which combined chastisement and encouragement. The Japanese forced the Eurasians to re-examine and re-orientate their ethnic identity. Without doubt, they were now encouraged to see themselves as ‘Asiatics’.

In retrospect, the Eurasians were subjected by their British and Japanese overlords to inconsistent policies which often left them confused and helpless. As a consequence, their self-definitions of identity underwent marked changes over time. Post-war developments in Singapore brought about a torrent of political changes that particularly affected the Eurasians. They emerged as a people who sometimes felt displaced and marginalised. The strengths and unique traits which the community once possessed—domicility, education and social privilege—were no longer their preserve in a nation that aimed to make egalitarianism and merit the cornerstones of its polity. This thesis argues that circumstantialism has been a dominant force in powerfully shaping the Eurasian identity. This identity was not given in a primordialist sense but was constructed from historical configurations and social circumstances, in which the relationship between the ‘Rulers’ and the ‘Ruled’ played an extraordinarily potent part.

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The Revitalization of Eurasian Identity in Singapore

Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science
Volume 25, Number 2 (1997)
pages 7-24
DOI: 10.1163/030382497X00149

Alexius Pereira

This paper accounts for the revitalization of Eurasian identity in the 1990s. The revitalization was instrumental, as Eurasians had found themselves socially marginalized, particularly since the other ethnic groups were becoming more assertive about their respective ethnic identities since the 1980s. To counter this, the Eurasians selectively constructed a set of cultural practices and outlooks which were unique to the group, but not necessarily reviving practices that were “lost”. The revitalization was therefore not a deep-seated emotional or primordial attachment to their identity; instead, it was used to improve the position of the community in Singapore.