Chinese privilege in politics: a case study of Singapore’s ruling elites

Zainal, Humairah; Abdullah, Walid Jumblatt

doi:10.1080/14631369.2019.1706153

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…In some respects, 'Japanese privilege' may be more pervasive than white privilege in Japan then, which may be related to a unique phenomenon in the Japanese context whereby Japanese people may understand themselves as being even more entitled to claim ownership of whiteness than those who we usually think of as white (Bonnett 2002). Similar patterns have also been found in other East Asian contexts, such as in Hong Kong and Singapore, where 'Chinese privilege' may be increasingly superseding white privilege (Barr andSkrbiš 2011 [2008]; Groves & O'Connor 2020;Li and Liu 2021;Zainal and Abdullah 2019). Thus, it is evident that whiteness is not an unfettered key to unbridled privileged in East Asia which may mean that white academics may be resented, perceived as a nuisance, and may even be viewed as symbolising a legacy of imperialism.…”

Section: The Limits Of White Privilegesupporting

confidence: 53%

‘But you’re white’: An autoethnography of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian universities

Moosavi

2022

Research in Comparative and International Education

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It is well established within the field of Critical Whiteness Studies that white privilege routinely materialises in Western universities. Yet, even though a third wave of Critical Whiteness Studies is increasingly focussing on whiteness in non-Western contexts, there has been insufficient attention toward whether white privilege also exists in East Asian universities. This article seeks to explore this issue by offering an autoethnography in which the author, a mixed-race academic who is racialised as white on some occasions and as a person of colour on others, critically interrogates whiteness in East Asian higher education. It is argued that those who are racialised as white are privileged in East Asian universities and may even seek to actively sustain this. In departing from the dominant understanding of whiteness as always-and-only privileging, this article also explores the extent to which white academics in East Asia may also be disadvantaged by their whiteness.

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Section: The Limits Of White Privilegesupporting

confidence: 53%

‘But you’re white’: An autoethnography of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian universities

Moosavi

2022

Research in Comparative and International Education

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“…Though incidents of “everyday racism” (Velayutham 2009) were well‐documented before—from a Chinese Singaporean elected official making jokes about Indians’ skin color in Parliament (ibid, 255) to noise complaints habitually filed against Malay outdoor weddings (Lai and Mathews 2016, 30–31) to “brownface” incidents in which Chinese Singaporeans darkened their skin and dressed in stereotypical Indian attire (Pak forthcoming)—Thanapal’s neologism inaugurated a growing interdiscursive chain of apology, critique, and counter‐critique of the term and its referents (e.g. Goh and Chong 2020; Zainal and Abdullah 2019). Singapore’s system of racialized majoritarian privilege, of course, does not emanate from ethno‐racial personhood, nor from demographic majority‐status, but rather co‐constitutes both as conditions of and justification for privilege.…”

Section: Postracial Policing and Counter‐critiques Of Racialized Majo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Postracial Policing, “Mother Tongue” Sourcing, and Images of Singlish Standard

Babcock

2022

J Linguistic Anthropol

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After decades of denigration and targeting by the state, Singlish-or Singaporean Colloquial English-has come into its own as a "uniquely Singaporean" phenomenon (Wee 2018), both a source and site of projects of raciolinguistic value-creation (Rosa and Flores 2017). Today, Singlish is often presented as emblematic of broader "racial harmony" among Singapore's four official races, yet it has also become an arena for articulating and rejecting critiques of racialized Chinese-Singaporean majoritarian privilege. This paper analyzes interviews with literary producers, public presentations by artists, and published mediatized texts in which Singlish comes into being as a site of ideological contestation. It describes two contrastive figures and the discourse registers through which they are materialized: first, postracial policing, voiced as an insistence that Singlish is sui generis, and second, "Mother Tongue" sourcing, voiced as an insistence on adherence, in spelling and pronunciation, to the racialized "Mother Tongue" varieties (and their racialized speakers) from which Singlish items are sourced. I argue that these two figures and enregistered positions co-participate in the production of an image of standard: a felt sense of standard-likeness that emerges as an effect of aesthetic textuality (Nakassis 2019), even in the absence of overt standardization projects. [image texts, multilingualism, raciolinguistics, Singapore, standards and standardization]

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“…Zainal and Abdullah argue that ensuring that ethnically Chinese Singaporeans are favoured in political and meritocratic spheres is important for sustaining hegemony. 58 Both Zainal and Abdullah's and Velayutham's analyses of racism in Singapore highlight some structural forces at the root of the production of racialised disadvantage, noting the continuing prevalence of racially charged semiotic structures in framing interactions and the continuing exclusion of minority citizens from important spheres of life, such as education and official politics. Indeed, what frequently also goes unrecognised when academic or political debate draws attention to the problems of racism in Singapore, such as when scholars draw attention to 'Chinese privilege' or 'everyday racism', is that the structures of exclusion between citizens and non-citizens may be more tangible and severe forms of racialisation.…”

Section: Singapore's Racial Regimementioning

confidence: 99%

Moralising racial regimes: surveillance and control after Singapore’s ‘Little India riots’

Greener¹

2022

Race & Class

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This article examines the moral politics of state organised social control in bolstering racialisation in Singapore after the 2013 disturbances in ‘Little India’, when agencies mobilised morally charged discourses regarding alcohol consumption amongst low-income South Asian migrants. Appealing to moral constructions of the ‘riots’ discredited socio-political analyses of the events, after which the state developed a mass architecture of alcohol-related ‘governing through crime’, placing migrant lives under permanent and constant surveillance. The piece contributes to debates about moral economy approaches by connecting the strategic deployment and justification of crime control underpinning racial regimes and reveals inadequacies in critical thinking around ‘race’ in Singapore, most notably a preoccupation with interactional accounts of racism rather than institutional state power.

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Chinese privilege in politics: a case study of Singapore’s ruling elites

Cited by 16 publications

References 27 publications

‘But you’re white’: An autoethnography of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian universities

‘But you’re white’: An autoethnography of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian universities

Postracial Policing, “Mother Tongue” Sourcing, and Images of Singlish Standard

Moralising racial regimes: surveillance and control after Singapore’s ‘Little India riots’

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