Blame Race
Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.
Of the many social faultlines exposed and deepened by the current crisis, race stands out for its power to attract blame. The US is seeing a spate of hate crimes against Asian Americans, encouraged by a blame-China campaign by Trump and his allies. Singapore, which has long shunted its South Asian migrant workers into crowded dormitories, is caught unprepared for a surge in coronavirus infection among this vulnerable population. Actions taken to address this surge have been slow and confusing, even dangerous. A migrant rights advocacy group discovered that a group of migrant workers were locked up in their room by their dormitory operator. This is horrifying but not surprising, given the country's racialized fear of an exploited and silenced population.
In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that the American ideal of freedom is not formed by the Enlightenment tradition so much as it is constituted against the American experience of slavery. The argument is developed by the insightful examination of canonical white American writers such as Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway. The powerful suggestion here is that race is deployed to create and reinforce conceptual and moral dichotomies. White freedom versus black slavery. Or, in the case of Asian Americans, the white native versus the Asian foreigner. In denial of their history of settler colonialism, white Americans define themselves as native by casting Asian Americans as permanent aliens.
I will suggest that a similar phenomenon is happening in Singapore, with the dominant Chinese population taking the part of White Americans, and South Asians taking the part of Asian Americans. In the cultural imagination, the Chinese citizen is constituted against the Indian migrant. Well-intentioned efforts at publishing and celebrating migrant workers' writing, such as the annual migrant worker poetry competition, have the harmful effect of shoring up the self-conception of Chinese Singaporeans as model citizens. To break this pernicious link, Singapore must do two things. First, create a clear pathway for migrant workers to become citizens. Second, to give migrant workers who choose to retain their status the same rights and protections as Singaporean workers.
During this National Poetry Month, I set out to write a cycle of palinodes in the voice of my dead father, meaning to explore the intricacy of family relations. Pandemic and politics intervened, and I found myself responding to the Singapore crisis by writing the following poem. The ending surprised me.
Palinode VII
Remember that construction
worker
run over
by the bus, setting off
a riot?
I see him
in every Indian here,
short or tall,
handsome
or devastated,
starving or sleek-headed
and satisfied.
I can’t help it.
Why can’t I
see Rajaratnam
our Deputy
Prime Minister or
the guitarist Alex
Abisheganaden instead?
I go up,
like getting
on a bus,
to every Indian here
and I ask,
are you
Sakthivel Kumaravelu?
And they say,
every one
of them, smiling,
or grimacing, or
furrowing
the brow,
Don’t you wish
for me to be him?
Jee Leong Koh
April 23, 202
Of the many social faultlines exposed and deepened by the current crisis, race stands out for its power to attract blame. The US is seeing a spate of hate crimes against Asian Americans, encouraged by a blame-China campaign by Trump and his allies. Singapore, which has long shunted its South Asian migrant workers into crowded dormitories, is caught unprepared for a surge in coronavirus infection among this vulnerable population. Actions taken to address this surge have been slow and confusing, even dangerous. A migrant rights advocacy group discovered that a group of migrant workers were locked up in their room by their dormitory operator. This is horrifying but not surprising, given the country's racialized fear of an exploited and silenced population.
In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that the American ideal of freedom is not formed by the Enlightenment tradition so much as it is constituted against the American experience of slavery. The argument is developed by the insightful examination of canonical white American writers such as Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway. The powerful suggestion here is that race is deployed to create and reinforce conceptual and moral dichotomies. White freedom versus black slavery. Or, in the case of Asian Americans, the white native versus the Asian foreigner. In denial of their history of settler colonialism, white Americans define themselves as native by casting Asian Americans as permanent aliens.
I will suggest that a similar phenomenon is happening in Singapore, with the dominant Chinese population taking the part of White Americans, and South Asians taking the part of Asian Americans. In the cultural imagination, the Chinese citizen is constituted against the Indian migrant. Well-intentioned efforts at publishing and celebrating migrant workers' writing, such as the annual migrant worker poetry competition, have the harmful effect of shoring up the self-conception of Chinese Singaporeans as model citizens. To break this pernicious link, Singapore must do two things. First, create a clear pathway for migrant workers to become citizens. Second, to give migrant workers who choose to retain their status the same rights and protections as Singaporean workers.
During this National Poetry Month, I set out to write a cycle of palinodes in the voice of my dead father, meaning to explore the intricacy of family relations. Pandemic and politics intervened, and I found myself responding to the Singapore crisis by writing the following poem. The ending surprised me.
Palinode VII
Remember that construction
worker
run over
by the bus, setting off
a riot?
I see him
in every Indian here,
short or tall,
handsome
or devastated,
starving or sleek-headed
and satisfied.
I can’t help it.
Why can’t I
see Rajaratnam
our Deputy
Prime Minister or
the guitarist Alex
Abisheganaden instead?
I go up,
like getting
on a bus,
to every Indian here
and I ask,
are you
Sakthivel Kumaravelu?
And they say,
every one
of them, smiling,
or grimacing, or
furrowing
the brow,
Don’t you wish
for me to be him?
Jee Leong Koh
April 23, 202
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