Tag: stereotypes

Punjabi Author: Racist Parents Breed Racist Children

A few years ago, I was standing in line at the Customs checkpoint in Bangkok airport when a little blonde-haired boy caught my attention. He wanted to show me his toy truck and the light-up keychain hanging from his backpack. As we played together, he casually remarked that I was standing in the wrong line. ‘You should go over there,’ he said. ‘This line is not for black people.’

I stared at him, certain that I had heard incorrectly. He nodded to another line (which, like our line, was populated by people of all ethnicities) and said, ‘Black people go there.’

I looked up at his mother for an explanation. Surely, she would chastise him, or at the very least, apologize on his behalf. But she pulled him closer. When the line moved forward, she hurried him to the Customs counter to get their passports stamped, and they disappeared into the crowd. Certain that the parents had shaped that sort of thinking, I wondered at what else they said in private that made him so confident to label an adult and tell her she belonged elsewhere.

On July 23rd, Shan Wee wrote an opinion piece for The Straits Times about his child referring to Shan’s Indian friend Nikhil as “The Black One.” Uncomfortable with his son’s “bluntly racialist” description, Shan told his son that he couldn’t say that. His son argued that he didn’t know the friend’s name, an excuse that Shan found acceptable.

I was reminded again of my outrage at the mother at the airport. I assumed that Shan’s son’s bluntness was the tip of the iceberg of prejudices that were promoted at home, consciously or otherwise. I thought about manners, and the audacity of parents to model such limiting worldviews for their children.

Then my friend – let’s call her Melissa – posted a response to Shan’s article on her Facebook page. Recently, her son revealed that he and his classmates made fun of an Indian girl for being dark. I was surprised. My theory about children’s prejudices was that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but Melissa is a conscientious and thoughtful parent. Melissa was also appalled; she thought she was doing enough by reading books on diversity to her son. But instead of shrugging and accepting that kids say the darndest things, Melissa opened up a productive conversation about differences with her son, starting with asking him how the girl probably felt about being bullied.

Because of Melissa’s experience, my concern has shifted from what Shan’s son said to what Shan took away from it. He wrote: “I just hope and pray that he will live life free from adult prejudices, adult sensitivities and adult divisions for as long as possible. If that means that he’ll be calling my buddy Nik The Black One from time to time, then I’m okay with that.”

Why not seize the chance to teach your child about prejudices and divisions then? How do you think Nikhil might feel about being called The Black One? How do you think I felt about being told to stand in another line because of my skin colour? Yes, children might say inappropriate things despite their parents’ best efforts to instill good manners. Let’s assume that this was what happened with Shan’s son, and the little boy at the airport. But let’s not miss the opportunity to teach them to treat people with respect, consideration and dignity as well.

Source: Balli Kaur Jaswal

August 3, 2017
Singapore Filmmakers Need To Be More Progressive On Their Interpretations Of Race

To Singaporeans complaining about whitewashing & cultural appropriation in Hollywood:

PLEASE LAH. The same thing’s been happening in our own little film industry, and no-one seems to have spoken up about it.

CASE ONE: Jack Neo’s “Ah Boyz to Men”: a film about National Service in which ALL the main characters were Chinese. When he had the chance to reboot the series with a Part 3, did he develop one of the Malay, Indian or Eurasian minor characters? Nope! He invited a Taiwanese guest star to steal the limelight. (Remember, this show got MINDEF money to create images of the SAF which no non-Chinese kid would identify with.)

CASE TWO: Gilbert Chan’s “23:59” and “Ghost Child／鬼仔”。 These are horror movies based on Malay folklore: spirits on Pulau Tekong (where you can’t bring pork) and the toyol. The casts are completely made up of Chinese people.

CASE THREE: Raymond Tan’s “Wayang Boy/戏曲小子”. This one’s interesting, because the main character is an Indian immigrant kid who speaks Mandarin, and Suhaimi Yusof plays a teacher in his school. And yet it’s set in a Singapore where there are no other Indians (his dad’s dead and his stepmother’s a Chinese woman who forces him to speak Chinese).

CASE FOUR: Nearly all the shows on Channel 8—still Mediacorp’s most-watched channel—do not feature Malay, Indian or Eurasian characters. In contrast, Suria and Vasantham shows feature Chinese sidekicks regularly.

The obvious rebuttal to this is that it’s harder to cast non-Chinese when you’re working in Mandarin, which is the language that seems to do best for film and TV here (another kettle of fish there…).

And yet some shows have done it successfully. Chai Yee Wei’s “That Girl in Pinafore”. Jack Neo’s “Long Long Time Ago”. These films don’t shy away from racial prejudice either—they expose it. On Channel 8 there was also “School Days/七彩学堂”, which was a Chinese version of “Mind Your Language”, but with less stereotyping.

(Oh, and tons of young non-Chinese Singaporeans today can speak Mandarin. They just may not have told you.)

By the way, Jack Neo’s making “Ah Boyz to Men 4” and Gilbert Chan’s making “23:59 Part 2”. Can anyone buzz them and tell them to be a little more progressive? Thanks.

Source: Ng Yi-Sheng

May 30, 2017
Stamford Raffles And John Crawfurd Believed That Malays Were Inferior To The British

For the Malays who love their colonialists..

What did Raffles and John Crawfurd (the Second Resident of Singapura) think of the Malays?

Raffles:
“He held that Malays were a rude, uncivilised and degraded race, much in decline from a high point of civilisation that they had once attained.

No development in thought and science was thus expected of them except for the most rudimentary aspects of knowledge. He found them to be generally indolent.

Although he later acknowledged them as being advanced in civilisation, albeit at varying degrees, and of varied characteristics, he maintained the view that Malays were no match to the British at that time,but were to be compared only with “some of the borderers in North Britain, not many centuries ago.”

John Crawfurd:

The second Resident of Singapura was a little kinder. He referred to the Malays as imbeciles, ignorant and not deserving of notice.

“Crawfurd thus contended that ‘the traditions of the Malays themselves are altogether undeserving of notice’, given that, on their level of civilisation:

Their imbecility of reason and their ignorance as to matters of fact are equally beyond the comprehension of any one accustomed only to European society.

And we still look up to the colonialists?

References:
Aljunied, Syed Muhd Khairudin, Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, and Barbara Watson Andaya. Rethinking Raffles: A Study of Stamford Raffles’ Discourse on Religions Amongst Malays. Marshall Cavendish International, 2005.

Crawfurd, J. 1814. History and languages of the Indian islands. Edinburgh Review 23(45): 151–89.
quoted in:

Müller, Martin. Manufacturing Malayness: British debates on the Malay nation, civilisation, race and language in the early nineteenth century. Indonesia and the Malay World, 2014, Vol.42(123), p.170-196

Source: Almakhazin SG

February 10, 2016
Sangeetha Thanapal: City Harvest Church Incident Shows Double Standards In Which Islam And Christianity Are Held Accuntable

What’s interesting to me in all this City Harvest stuff, is that no one is talking about this as a peril of Christianity. No one is using this as an example of how there’s something wrong with Christianity and Christians who are so easily misled and brainwashed.

Compare this to any rhetoric on anyone who is vaguely brown and Muslim. It immediately becomes about Islam, a failure or inherent flaw in Islam and these Muslims who are so easily radicalized and brainwashed.

As always, western religion when practiced by Chinese people gets a pass. They get to be people in their own right, not strereotypes to be made fun of.

Source: Sangeetha Thanapal

October 23, 2015
Marie Claire Should Stay Put Of Sociopolitics

Marie Claire Magazine’s article titled “10 Muslim Women Shatter Stereotypes by Showing Off Their Style” has been getting a lot of attention from Muslims on social media. While the target audience is probably a non-Muslim one, some American Muslim women have taken a critical eye to the piece and are confused by the article, wondering, “How does this shatter stereotypes about Muslim women like me?”

But what stereotypes about Muslim women do Americans hold that need shattering in the first place? The article’s tagline claims that these women’s fashion sense “[banishes] the idea of the oppressed Muslim woman.” The article further claims that these women, “stand up for their autonomy every time they get dressed.” There isn’t much expository substance other than that in this article, and I fail to see the connecting thread between all ten of the women featured, besides that they are “fashionable.” What does being “well-dressed” have to do with shattering the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman? Are being “oppressed” and “unfashionable” synonymous, while being “independent” and “fashionable” synonymous here? Are these notions of oppression and a lack of agency being oddly conflated with Muslim women observing a “traditional” or “conservative” Islamic dress code, or lack thereof?

Source: www.altmuslimah.com

July 28, 2015