\n<\/p>\n
Mr Shanmugam\u2019s remarks suggest this tendency is very much alive. He cited not only the comments over the missing Singaporeans in Nepal but also racial attacks on Temasek chief executive Dilhan Pillay over Air India’s reported effort to raise capital. The insinuation was that his ethnicity somehow determined where his loyalties lay.<\/p>\n
Again, the individual disappears into the category. That is perhaps the most corrosive thing about racism: It denies people the right to be encountered as individuals.<\/p>\n
Our research should therefore offer some reassurance. The Singapore of the ugliest comments online is not the Singapore in our surveys.<\/p>\n
But the comments section is not disconnected from Singapore either. It amplifies prejudices that remain latent in parts of society.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That does not require moral panic every time someone posts something offensive. It does require that political leaders, community organisations, institutions and ordinary Singaporeans \u2013 especially those who are not themselves the target \u2013 say plainly, and early, that this is not the society we accept.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the real test of \u201cSingaporeanness\u201d in this episode is what the rest of us do when the boundaries of belonging are drawn more narrowly.<\/p>\n
If this is not who we are, then we have to demonstrate it repeatedly.<\/p>\n
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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mr Shanmugam\u2019s remarks suggest this tendency is very much alive. He cited not only the comments over the missing Singaporeans in Nepal but also racial…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":83157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dam.mediacorp.sg\/image\/upload\/s--Q1KG0SGI--\/c_crop,h_1125,w_1999,x_1,y_129\/c_fill,g_auto,h_676,w_1200\/fl_relative,g_south_east,l_mediacorp:cna:watermark:2021-08:cna,w_0.1\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1\/mediacorp\/cna\/image\/2026\/09\/05\/k_shanmugam_sep5.jpeg?itok=S7t_Y6zP","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1126,5983,9670,11272,16658,18835,29516,22],"class_list":["post-83156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-news-sg-global","tag-commentary","tag-comments","tag-disaster","tag-nepal","tag-normal","tag-racist","tag-shameful","tag-singapore","wpcat-2-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/83157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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