I rmb talking to people in a hostel about Singapore and they said "well, at least its' not racist". Hun, lots of SGreans think blackface is 'FUN', a sign of minstrelsy's LONG presence in Singapore from colonial days, and we exploit non-White/non-Chinese foreign labour as a permanent underclass. - ThreadSky

angmohsnowball.bsky.social • 132 days ago

I rmb talking to people in a hostel about Singapore and they said "well, at least its' not racist".

Hun, lots of SGreans think blackface is 'FUN', a sign of minstrelsy's LONG presence in Singapore from colonial days, and we exploit non-White/non-Chinese foreign labour as a permanent underclass.

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angmohsnowball.bsky.social•132 days ago

Tell me which other 'non-racist' place hires people from some countries (PHI/IND/MYA) to act as domestic servants, people from other countries (IND/BAN) as migrant construction workers, where it's okay to pay them extraordinarily low wages & surveil them in dorms far away from the city centre.

angmohsnowball.bsky.social•132 days ago

SG's state has formed a narrative of what types of racism SHOULD be condemned. They really only condemn direct confrontations like "fuck [insert race here]" or racial slurs, anything with an outward appearance of attacking others. Those get condemned, regardless of the context of how it happens.

angmohsnowball.bsky.social•132 days ago

But racism intended to 'joke', like minstrelsy, may still receive condemnation, but not an outward rejection. Doing so would call to explicitly racialised power dynamics that SG is built upon, where White/Chinese people dehumanize non White/Chinese bodies to the point where they can be a costume.

angmohsnowball.bsky.social•132 days ago

Also there's an incredible lack of education of minstrelsy in colonial/early Singapore. People are led to think it's a form of racism specific to certain places (like USA) cos of it, when this has been going on for CENTURIES in Singapore and, yes, it's still racist no matter where you do it.

angmohsnowball.bsky.social•132 days ago

If you want to know more, there's this incredible paper I found, written last year after THAT similarly insane brownface advertisement that appeared a few years ago, talking about minstrelsy and its' effects on SG: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07256868.2021.1997955#d1e263

angmohsnowball.bsky.social•132 days ago

Special shoutout to THIS quote in its' conclusion (modified for readability here): "We cannot dissociate the civil code from the structures of domination that enabled it in the first place".

kirancodes.me•132 days ago

Were they white? I am losing my mind at the number of white ppl who have said to my face that this place is not racist... like while I'm literally facing this shit every day

I even had a Romanian friend "defend" the housing discrimination against indians with "Oh that's just because they smell"

angmohsnowball.bsky.social•132 days ago

The person I was talking about was white, but quite a number of people I met while travelling have said this, from Asian-Americans to Europeans and more. Singapore cannot claim it's 'racially harmonious' when only some people can say that to be true.

kirancodes.me•132 days ago

Oh and the gut punch was that being Romanian she must have experienced the same kinda racism back in Europe but I guess as long as it's dark skinned people being fucked over then that time it's actually acceptable

kirancodes.me•132 days ago

I really hate how like oblivious and ignorant white people just get assimilated into the racial hierarchy and accept this bullshit without question

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