Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more