MARUAH Singapore

https://www.un.org/en/observances/end-racism-day

To mark International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a writer (S. Porter) has contributed the following reflections to MARUAH, sharing perspectives on this topic.

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There are days in the calendar that ask something of us. The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is one such day. It does not merely commemorate days of tragedies when peaceful protestors were killed for opposing apartheid’s pass laws. It also asks us to look inward, to take stock of where we stand in our own journey toward a society where race does not determine destiny.

For MARUAH, this year’s observance invites a moment of quiet reflection on Singapore’s path in our struggle towards building a racially harmonious society. We have built something remarkable. A multiracial society that functions, that coheres, that largely avoids the open communal violence that marked our early years. This is not a small achievement. Yet the question that lingers, is this one as this day presses upon us, is whether “functions” and “coheres” are enough. Or whether we are called into something deeper. 

Before turning to this inquiry, we ought to be clear about about what we are examining and what we can know. Our focus here is specifically on racial discrimination, not religious harmony, though in lived experiences, the two are often intertwined. We also acknowledge the importance of intersectionality. Individuals may experience overlapping forms of discrimination based on race, gender, class and sexuality, and that a full account would be needed to attend to these complexities. For now, we narrow our lens to race alone, acknowledging that this is an analytical simplification. We must also be honest about the limits of our evidence. Singapore publishes close to no comprehensive public data tracking how racial discrimination operates on the ground. No large-scale surveys mapping incidents across employment, housing, or education that can serve as authoritative academic evidence. What we have instead are fragments – instances surface in the public domain, reports in mainstream media, the unstructured testimony as seen in social media where individuals share experiences that might otherwise remain invisible and through surveys. These fragments cannot tell us everything with objective standards, but they offer windows into lived experiences.

The Evidence Before Us

What does the research tell us? Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorise citizens into four major race groups ordered according to size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This framework, a derivative of colonialism and our pathway to independence, governed and shaped social life in Singapore. Yet, recent scholarship examining the Instagram page @MinorityVoices found that ethnic minority youths are sharing personal experiences of racism, reflecting what researchers term as the uneven distribution of “racial capital” and its impact on social mobility within Singapore’s racial landscape. The platform’s activity has since dwindled following legal repercussions for activists, but its brief existence underscores both the hunger for such conversations and the constraints within which they must occur.

The academic literature adds depth to this picture. Researchers note that historically, discussions on racism in the multiracial city-state were subdued, with ethnic minorities experiencing discrimination in silence. The advent of Web 2.0 and social media platforms since the 2000s has reshaped how racial issues are reported and debated, yet conversations on race are often subsumed under the ideals of social harmony and national cohesion .

The Complexity of “Chinese Privilege”

There is perhaps no phrase more charged in Singapore’s current discourse than “Chinese privilege.” When it emerged in public conversation, it generated discomfort. A 2021 IPS panel saw academics push back against the term, with one suggesting it imported American racial frameworks inappropriately, and another arguing that the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew would have “stomped on it” . Public reactions were divided. Some agreed that the concept was imported nonsense. Others pointed out that denying the existence of privilege seemed in itself a form of privilege.

What are we to make of this? In a significant contribution to this discourse, National University of Singapore scholars have examined how Western ideas of racialised power rooted in Whiteness are reconfigured in postcolonial Singapore. They analyse how processes of racialisation and racial categorisation are uncritically reproduced in invocations of Chinese privilege as both censure and confessional. The term, continuous from White privilege, may be understood as the belief that sociopolitical advantages are accorded to those racialised as Chinese. Perhaps the term itself matters less than what it points toward: the recognition that in any multiethnic society, majorities and minorities do not stand on level ground. The ground may be more level here than elsewhere, and for this, perhaps, we can be grateful. But levelling means there are degrees of disparities.  Asking whether unearned advantages accrue to being part of the majority ,is not to accuse. It is to inquire. And it is with inquiry, can there be the beginning of wisdom, fairness and redress.

The Ugly and the Mundane

Alongside these structural questions, there is the uglier face of discrimination. In 2014, MARUAH joined 11 other civil society groups to warn of surging xenophobia, the “widespread use of racist, aggressive and militarised rhetoric” against foreigners on social networks, and a worrying trend of blaming foreigners for social ills . That warning remains relevant. More recently, Temasek was forced to speak out after social media posts featured multiple Indian employees’ LinkedIn profiles, questioning why the company hired foreigners instead of locals. Temasek’s CEO described this as “a cowardly act of hate” designed to stir division. Discrimination is not only dramatic but historically it functions as a recollective.  It is casual remarks, the assumption, the moment of exclusion that leave no legal trace but accumulate in the body and memory of victims. Researchers studying the sticky “raciolinguistics” of Singapore note that recent race talk has birthed contentious terms that have found their way into common parlance, deployed as explanations for overt and covert racism.

What the Law Currently Says

There is, however, reason for cautious hope. The passage of the Workplace Fairness Act 2025 represents Singapore’s first move towards codifying anti-discrimination protections. The Act, when it comes into effect will give individuals the right to bring a civil action under a new statutory tort of discrimination. It prohibits adverse employment decisions based on protected characteristics including race, religion, and age, and requires employers to develop written grievance handling procedures. For women, the Act’s protections around pregnancy, marital status, and caregiving responsibilities are particularly significant.

Yet the Act’s full implementation is not expected until the end of 2027. And its scope, while important, is limited to the workplace. Discrimination in housing, in services, in the thousand small transactions of daily life, these remain largely untouched by formal law. The Ethnic Integration Policy, (EIP) introduced in 1989, has successfully prevented the formation of racial enclaves in public housing. The policy sets limits on the percentage of a block or neighbourhood that can be occupied by a specific ethnicity, aiming to create more opportunities for organic interactions. But it operates by consent, embedded in contractual terms rather than legislation, and applies only to the 80 percent of Singaporeans who live in HDB flats . Those in private housing face no such quotas. Recent research suggests that clustering at the neighbourhood level persists, with some regions identified as having reached specific quotas, indicate emerging hotspots that require attention. Moreover there are ethnically-based private housing enclaves when we look at nationality-based expatriates. These instances subvert the EIP’s purpose as racial enclaves occur elsewhere by others with the exception of those living in public housing. The bigger question is how EIP is still a useful policy to prevent racially-based acts of protests or disorder occurring within the living areas of people in Singapore. We ask if EIP functions well enough in contributing to society’s coherence within being ethnically diverse.

A Different Kind of Question

Perhaps the question before us is not whether Singapore has achieved racial harmony. By most measures, it has, at least in the minimal sense of communal peace. The deeper question is whether we have achieved racial justice, whether the distribution of opportunity, of voice, of the capacity to shape one’s life, is genuinely equal across communities.

This is a different kind of question. It cannot be answered by pointing to the absence of riots. It requires looking at patterns: who leads, who decides, who feels they belong. It requires listening to those who speak of “racial capital” and its uneven distribution. It requires acknowledging that the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) framework, which guides virtually all forms of interracial relations in Singapore in accordance with demographic proportions, has been defended by the Government as helping to build trust, yet public and academic debates have challenged its usefulness. As researchers note, there has been little imagination of race beyond CMIO .

What We Might Do

On this day of remembrance, MARUAH offers not a set of demands but an invitation to all stakeholders, to Government, to employers, to community leaders, to every citizen, to sit with these questions.

To acknowledge the data. The patterns revealed in academic research are not accusations. They are information. They tell us where we are. And we cannot chart a course to where we want to be without knowing where we stand.

To build upon what has been begun. The Workplace Fairness Act 2025 is a foundation, not a completion. Its full implementation and enforcement deserve our collective attention and support.

To protect the space for honest conversation. The scholars who study @MinorityVoices note the chilling effect of legal constraints on public discourse about race. Yet candid conversation is the medium through which understanding grows. We must find ways to speak that neither tear apart nor silence.

To examine the spaces the law does not reach. As researchers of the Ethnic Integration Policy observe, integration remains a work in progress and policies must be continuously refined to address changing circumstances. It is the quality, rather than quantity, of interactions that matter most in forging connections. These dynamics cannot be legislated, but they can be named, addressed and converse upon.

References

The Edge Malaysia. (2014, May 29). Singapore activists warn of surging xenophobia. The Edge Financial Daily. https://theedgemalaysia.com/article/singapore-activists-warn-surging-xenophobia

Marketing-Interactive. (2026, February 18). Temasek to press FB on clamping hate speech as staff doxed on social. Marketing-Interactive. https://www.marketing-interactive.com/temasek-to-press-fb-on-clamping-hate-speech-as-staff-doxed-on-social

Pak, V., & Hiramoto, M. (2025). Sticky raciolinguistics. Signs and Society, Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/signs-and-society/article/sticky-raciolinguistics/250E595DD4F4F366E01270574FB2A4C6

DLA Piper. (2025, September 29). Consultation paper on the second Workplace Fairness Bill. DLA Piper GENIE. https://knowledge.dlapiper.com/dlapiperknowledge/globalemploymentlatestdevelopments/2025/consultation-paper-on-the-second-workplace-fairness-bill

SMU City Perspectives. (2026, February 1). Living in diversity: Singapore’s unique Ethnic Integration Policy. SMU City Perspectives. https://cityperspectives.smu.edu.sg/article/living-diversity-singapores-unique-ethnic-integration-policy

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. (2025, December 3). Tracking the Ethnic Integration Policy: Analysing public housing patterns among immigrant and ethnic groups in Singapore. RSIS. https://rsis.edu.sg/rsis-event-article/rsis/tracking-the-ethnic-integration-policy-analysing-public-housing-patterns-among-immigrant-and-ethnic-groups-in-singapore/

The Singapore Law Gazette. (2026, January 14). Building flourishing workplaces: 3 areas to look out for in the Workplace Fairness Act. The Singapore Law Gazette. https://lawgazette.com.sg/practice/practice-matters/building-flourishing-workplaces/

Velayutham, S., & Somaiah, B. C. (2026). @MinorityVoices Singapore: whither online anti-racism? Third World Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/minorityvoices-singapore-whither-online-anti-racism

Wu, B. (2021). Shifting lanes: emerging perspectives in Singapore’s racial discourse [Final Year Project]. Nanyang Technological University. https://www.osmikon.de/osmikonsearch/Record/baseftnanyangtuoaidrntuedusg10356_147207