Measuring Race, Mixed Race, and Multiracialism in Singapore
July 18, 2022
Racial Harmony Day is held every 21st July in Singapore to commemorate the communal race riots of 1964, which risked inflaming racial tensions and tipping the balance towards even more widespread sectarian violence. A negative outcome from the 1964 riots would have undermined the necessary cohesion that formed the basis for post-Independence Singapore’s multicultural society. Racial Harmony Day serves as an annual reminder to all Singaporeans that what happened yesterday might well happen again today, unless we are all mindful of the progress and efforts that got us here in the first place.
Dr Zarine Rocha (NUS Sociology PhD graduate) and Professor Brenda Yeoh (NUS Geography & Asia Research Institute) consider race and mixed race in colonial and post-colonial Singapore, illustrating the ways in which race remains a key feature of state organization and social dynamics in the country in ‘Measuring Race, Mixed Race, and Multiracialism in Singapore’, a chapter in The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification (Palgrave, 2020).
The detailed history of British colonial categories highlights the changing nature of race on the island, with the revealing example of 47 groups in 1881 being collapsed into a vastly reduced six groups of Europeans, Eurasians, Malays, Chinese, Indians, and Others by 1921 indicative of the intentional simplification of identity by the British rulers.
Dr Rocha and Prof Yeoh go on to explain the particular drawbacks of residents caught between racial boundaries, in particular the Eurasians, who lost their distinctive grouping within the post-Independence CMIO multicultural framework as the Other category subsumed the previously distinct European and Eurasian identities. The authors discuss the hidden tension behind the term Eurasian, which, despite its core meaning of someone of mixed Asian and European descent, contains embedded legacies of patrilineal transmission of race, and consequently imprints on Singaporean-Eurasians the undesirable vestiges of colonialism and male chauvinism.
Other mixed heritage Singaporeans are also shown to have faced institutional problems, with the ‘double-barrelled’ racial classification only coming into effect from January 2011 and, in the words of Dr Rocha and Prof Yeoh, proving more symbolic than practical a change. Despite the opportunity for mixed race Singaporeans to now be able to have a hyphenated racial identity on their official documents, they are still required to select a primary race which will affect their language education, public housing, and social identity.
The chapter concludes with the acknowledgement that the CMIO framework is unlikely to be dismantled or greatly modified in the near future, due to the state’s belief that discarding it would risk racial tension and impinging on minorities’ rights. However, Singapore’s institutions are advised to look beyond the more limited and superficial implementation of double-barrelled race identification if they are to be more inclusive of the very group that ostensibly represents the very ideal of a truly multicultural Singapore.
Read the full chapter here.