Commentary: ‘Shameful’ racist comments after Nepal disaster should never become normal in Singapore

That is why the warning about normalisation matters. The danger is not in the number of people expressing these views today. It is what happens if everyone else grows accustomed to hearing them.

Social norms hold because people take cues about permissible conduct from one another. What begins as unacceptable can, through repetition and silence, become merely controversial, and then ordinary. No multiracial compact can be sustained by legislation alone. It is sustained when the majority makes its norms visible.

That does not require moral panic every time someone posts something offensive. It does require that political leaders, community organisations, institutions and ordinary Singaporeans – especially those who are not themselves the target – say plainly, and early, that this is not the society we accept.

There are simple ways of doing this in everyday life. When a racial generalisation is made in conversation, we should be ready to challenge it and not let silence be taken as agreement. We should be more careful about what we forward or amplify, especially when an individual incident is used to make claims about an entire racial or national group. 

And we should be able to separate legitimate concerns about immigration from attacks on people simply because of how they look or where we imagine they come from. Just as importantly, when someone is targeted, others should not leave that person to carry the burden of responding alone.

Perhaps the real test of “Singaporeanness” in this episode is what the rest of us do when the boundaries of belonging are drawn more narrowly.

If this is not who we are, then we have to demonstrate it repeatedly.

Mathew Mathews is Principal Research Fellow and head of the Social Lab at the Institute of Policy Studies, National University of Singapore. Teo Kay Key is Senior Research Fellow and Melvin Tay is Research Fellow at the same institute.