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Singapore Anglo-Chinese, the seduction of Whito-philia, and the invention of the West



The hegemonic Singapore Anglo-Chinese have a servile relationship with Whiteness. 

Everything White is a marker of desire here.

Whiteness takes a whole new dimension in Anglo-Chinese Singapore, celebrated, held up on a pedestal, with the incessant desire for copying it at the cellular level.

Here, you would think that the British haven't yet left, replete with the laboured copies of the accented tongue, the afternoon teas decked in the desires for Whiteness, and the preponderance of everything Raffles.

Most of Singapore's elites go through the perfected drills of anglicization in schools of Whiteness, preparing for further credentialing of these elite Singaporeans in the British and American networks of Whiteness (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Harvard, Yale). 

Among Singapore's Anglo-Chinese elites then, it is fairly common to see a British or American elite credential. Such credentialing is only an extension of the Whiteness that is drilled into the Anglo-Chinese schools.

The hegemony of these Anglo-Chinese schools in contemporary Singapore and the elite networks connected to these schools that control Singapore's political economy attests to the infrastructure of Whiteness that makes up the fabric of Singapore. The "Who-Is-Who" of the upper class Anglo-Chinese elite mostly are all the progenies of Raffles, the school I mean.

This fetish for Whiteness is conveniently propped up alongside the deployment of the "Western" trope to devalue and undermine universal principles such as social justice, democracy, and freedom, that are framed as belonging to the realm of the West. 

This is the ultimate of ironies in Anglo-Chinese Singapore.

On one hand, prostrate to Whiteness on all four extensions. And on the other hand, invoke the trope of the "Western influence" whenever any calls for social justice and democratic change arise.

An excellent example of this Anglo-Chinese paradox is the recent post (shared above) by a former Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP: NMPs in Singapore are selected by the hegemonic ruling party) highlighted in the image above. Even as Mr. Cheng accuses an anti-racist intervention as "copying the West," he does so by holding up the statue of Raffles, a key architect/symbol of the White colonial West.

That the likes of Mr. Cheng enjoy power and are aligned with the hegemonic structures of Singapore (and therefore protected in doxing), calling for social media attacks on an anti-racist intervention captures well the infrastructure of Singapore's Chinese-Whiteness networks of power and control. 

This decrying of the West when articulated in Singapore is richly ironic, in epitomizing a continuity of the White colonial tradition that is rarely seen in other postcolonies.

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