Rap against brownface and the politics of racism in Singapore

ABSTRACT

In July 2019, a Singapore government linked E-payment advertisement featured a Singaporean-Chinese celebrity depicting various ethnicities including wearing brownface to portray an Indian man. In response, Singaporean-Indian siblings Preeti and Subhas Nair produced a rap video containing expletives lampooning the advertisement for its racism. Singapore adopts a stringent policy towards public discussions of racial inequality and racism as they are seen to threaten its racial harmony. Authorities acted swiftly and banned the video. However, the perceived anonymity of online forums have made them a quasi-public sphere for race issues to be “freely” aired. This paper examines the reactions to the two incidents in order to conceive the nature of public discourse on racism in Singapore. We argue that policing of discourses about racial inequality inadvertently normalizes racism. When confronted with allegations of racism, online threads reveal a denial of hurt, defensiveness and micro-aggressions, exposing feelings of victimisation and racial equivalence.

KEYWORDS:

• Brownface
• racism
• Singapore
• multiracialism
• Indians
• ethnic minorities

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Saroja Dorairajoo and Vijay Devadas for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Singapore’s population consists of ethnic Chinese (76.2%), Malay (15%), Indian (7.4%) and Others (1.4%). Its official multiracial/multicultural model is referred to as CMIO.

2 Brownface incidents circulated via social/alternative media include the following incidents depicted here https://theindependent.sg/more-instances-of-chinese-people-wearing-brownface-to-portray-indians-recirculate-online/ and https://theindependent.sg/local-playwright-and-ri-alumnus-feels-repulsed-by-group-blackface-photo-at-his-old-school/.

3 onlinecitizenasia.com; mothership.sg and HardwareZone.com.sg.

4 Nothwithstanding, the government’s Media Development Authority closely monitors websites that present alternative views on socio-political issues and have in the past shut down or ordered website owners to remove “objectionable” content.

5 https://thisissgchineseprivilege.tumblr.com/

6 This begs the question why Singapore media practitioners and advertising agencies were oblivious and insensitive to issues of racism at a time when a global campaign against racial injustices was burgeoning.

7 Examples include: https://lipstickladdoolekhablog.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/what-it-feels-like-to-be-an-indian-girl-in-nus-business-school/, https://www.facebook.com/alfiansaat, https://sudhirtv.com/about/, https://www.minorityvoices.net/

8 A common example of brownface posted on the online forum was that of Justice Bao, a television series from Taiwan that ran from 1993 to 1994.