Systemic racialisation: Singaporean multiculturalism and its discontents

An often overlooked or underemphasised perspective in discourses on race, racialisation and racism is that of a systemic racialisation of people into “races”. While structures of racism are well studied and developed under the theory of systemic racism, structures and institutions of racialisation receive much lesser attention. However, systemic racialisation can provide conducive avenues for racialised groups to be socially and politically hierarchised, leading to racism despite systemic racism being not necessarily prevalent. Examining Singapore’s well-regulated and efficient state-espoused multiculturalism, this paper describes and deconstructs the postcolonial society’s systemic racialisation in its multiracial model of multiracialism and seemingly successful racial harmony to surface two main discontents, namely that of 1) ethnoracialisation, and 2) conflict avoidance and disempowered dialogue. The paper further illustrates how these two key problems in the Singaporean multiculturalism contributes to normalising racism.