The Value of a Token

During Singapore’s recently concluded General Election, I received a few notes from friends commenting about the lack of diversity amongst the ruling party’s candidates. While the ruling party did field candidates with Muslim sounding names, there were no noticeable Indian faces. To compound matters, the Deputy Prime Minister (or Prime Minister in-waiting) had said that the public was “not ready for a non-Chinese Prime Minister.” These words were repeated endlessly thus portraying the ruling party as a bastion of racial privilege.

Having lived as an ethnic minority in the UK for my formative years, I get the criticism of the ruling party’s lack of diversity in its candidates. When you are part of a minority, there’s something strangely appealing about being with and speaking with your own kind. In nearly a decade of living in the UK, London’s Chinatown always felt like a comfort zone. Although English is to all intents and purposes “my language” and my friends from that era of my life were all white Anglo-Saxons, there was something comforting about being with people who looked like me and hearing and communicating in something other than English.

However, as I’ve grown older and moved around more, I’ve come to question the value of having a “token” minority around. Do people of a different colour with a seat in a national legislature or on the board of directors make a country’s minorities more comfortable or business more appealing to different customers? If I take myself as an example, I was told that by my Western friends that I should brush up on my Chinese and become a bridge between East and West. However, if I look at myself objectively, I have to ask what type of bridge would I be. The only thing I have in common with most Chinese is the colour of my skin. While I can communicate in verbal Mandarin and Cantonese, I do so badly and I am Chinese illiterate (I communicate with Chinese via Google translate).

Instead of being a “bridge” between East and West, my real value was the fact that I was once an ethnic minority. The only time I get obvious delight from people is a professional setting is when I meet English lawyers and speak to them in a recognizable accent and understand that London is not the only part of the UK. Instead of being the bridge between the Occident and Orient, I gel most easily with people who don’t look like me – being able to discuss the value of Wasim Akram as a fast bowler or Sachin Tendulkar’s batting has proved to be invaluable from a commercial relationship building exercise.

If I look at my own experiences as an example, I have to question the value of tokens. What does the token this or that in the cabinet or on the board of directors actually done for their community that they are supposed to come from? Sure, there is an extreme of people feeling most comfortable with their own kind. Hence you have Chinese hiring Chinese, Indians hiring Indians and as an Australian friend pointed out, short people preferring to hire short people. I am a bald man who got hired by another bald man.

However, with tokens, the opposite is true. Chances are, they become so grateful to be part of what they perceive to be a “selective” group that once in the group, they do their best to ensure their own kind don’t get in. One merely has to observe how immigration officers of South Asian decent treat South Asians trying to enter the UK. It is, as one Englishman put it – a case of “drawing up the drawbridge.”

The most famous example of how a “token” ethnic minority has worked against her own community can be found in the form of Priti Patel, the British Foreign Secretary. The nicest thing about Ms. Patel is that she is pretty to look at.

Pretty but Not by Policy.

However, if you look at her actions, you will notice that they are anything but pretty. Ms. Patel, who is the daughter of Gujurati migrants, who came to Uganda after they were thrown out of Uganda (the people who made the Ugandan economy tick and would later reward Britain for generosity by doing for the British economy what they had done in Uganda), has famously been part of the “hard line” Brexit faction of the Conservative Party and has supported the scrapping of various human rights and environmental protection policies. Ms. Patel’s career in both the private and public sector have involved speaking up for the unsavory. She has helped her husband, a marketing consultant to the tax payers kitty and as Home Secretary, she has notoriously come up with the most hardline immigration policy the UK has ever implemented. By her own admission, her own parents would have never have been allowed to enter the UK.  A concurrence with my views on Ms. Patel can be found at:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Priti-Patel-the-most-attractive-UK-MP 

I am admittedly racist in favour of South Asians trying to enter the UK. In the years that I lived in the UK, these were the most hard-working group who created businesses and made a better life for themselves. The guys begging me for small change were never people of colour, they either opened corner shops or hustled to get you into a mini-cab. It was inevitably the native-born whites who hustled you for small change and got uppity when you refuse to give over the pennies that had been worked for. When someone like Ms. Patel comes with a hardline immigration policy and bleats on about “taking control of OUR borders,” I read it as “Enhancing racial superiority of the lay abouts who would happily murder people who look like me.” I think of a talk given by the British High Commissioner at a law firm that I’ve worked with. For the better part of the talk, she went on about how Brexit was great because we were “taking control of OUR borders.” Then, a White Anglo-Saxon asked her about the “Weaponising of Racism” and described how his wife, who is “non-white” was frightened about returning to the UK. Her Excellency didn’t seem to think that policies set by Ms. Patel were in anyway damaging to this man’s family.

In fairness to Ms. Patel, she isn’t the only ethnic minority who has made a career screwing her own kind. There’s Nikki Haley (Real Name - Nimrata Nikki Randhawa), former US Ambassador to the UN, who is the daughter of Sikh Immigrants (read – people who set up businesses and go to work). While Ms. Haley has been significantly more calculated in her policies than Ms. Patel, she’s also supported hard line policies on immigration, particularly those of the Trump Administration (read – tough fighters who run away when it comes to fighting people who can fight back)

Closer to home, there’s the example of Mr. Samy Velu, who was chairman of the Malaysian Indian Congress for 30-over years. Mr. Velu was very good at staying in public office. He was very good at ensuring that he and his cronies got very rich of public contracts (he was famous for collecting tolls). He was rather less good at doing anything for Malaysia’s Tamil population, who continue to be a kicked upon minority.

In Singapore, we have token ethnic minority ministers who have become very prominent for being, well good spokespeople for the establishment. I think of our often law and home affairs (apparently there’s no conflict of interest between making and enforcing laws), Mr. K. Shanmugaratnam, who accused to rappers from an ethnic minority of stirring racial tensions because they had the audacity to call out a tasteless add which involved someone from the ethnic majority painting his face brown.  It takes an ethnic minority to tell ethnic minorities to stay in their place – you are not allowed to get upset when the majority makes offensive remarks about you.

This isn’t just at the minister level. It’s always visible at immigration. Think of the South Asian immigration officers at any British port waiting to humiliate potential migrants from South Asia. I think of the time when I had a US Green card and wanted to snap it in half and fling it at the immigration officer. It was no coincidence that the officer in question was …..Chinese. In all my years of traveling to the US, I’ve never had a problem with anyone else.

It’s not just about race. It also applies to sex. For all of Donald Trump’s obvious sexism and bragging about sexual assault (grab them by the pussy), he was actually supported by an alarming number of women, who didn’t want another woman in power. Think about this, men will help women, particularly attractive ones. Put it crudely, we’ll do anything to have a woman consider us worthy as bed partners. The worst enemy of woman on the rise (particularly an attractive one), is another woman, who will inevitably view her as competition.

I believe in diversity. I think of places like London or New York, which stand out for economic vibrance, innovation and artistic creativity. Places like these tend to be diverse in more than one way. However, you can use tokenism to create diversity. You have to grow it from the bottom up. The token black, white, Asian, Latino, woman, homosexual etc, tends to do the opposite of create diversity. They’re there to ensure nobody takes their place as the only this or that in that position. Rather than worrying about more brown faces during an election, I’d prefer to hear more Yellow faces talking about giving Brown faces a fairer deal. Rather than a token woman on the board, how about more men promoting women. Tokens exist to enforce the status quo.

I remember an Indian security guard at my Dad’s condo many years ago. He actually took pride in explaining why it was correct that the company he worked for had a policy of not hiring Indians. If that doesn’t say it all, what does? 

Why Are You So Dark?

I’ve often argued that the human race has an incredible talent of finding areas of differences, there is one unfortunate factor that seems to unite the world. That unfortunate factor is the inability to view anyone of a darker skin tone as a normal human being.

Racism, particularly in the West, is currently a “Black-versus-White” issue. The murder of George Floyd, an African-American at the hands a “white” police officer on video ignited many years of pent-up anger that the Western world’s “black” population has had from years of laws that were designed to keep them down and when those laws were abolished, the fact that prejudices that lingered were for many parts accepted.

Unfortunately, the issue of racism is neither limited to a case of “blacks-versus-whites” nor is it limited to the Western world. In America, there is the undiscussed issue of “Asian-Black” relations. This was first seen in the 1992 LA Riots (caused by the beating of a black man by White Police officers and the subsequent acquittal of the police officers despite the evidence), when the city’s black population tried to loot stores owned by America’s Korean population. In the most recent incident, it was a cop of Asian decent who looked away while his “white” colleague murdered Mr. Floyd. More can be found at:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/officer-who-stood-george-floyd-died-asian-american-we-need-n1221311

Like it or not, Asians who have settled in the Western world have not been helpful to the issues faced by the black communities. The reason for this is simple, the Asian inability to see the suffering of other minorities in the West is the very thing that makes Asians valued immigrants – material success.

In America, they’re known as the “model-minority,” or the poor migrants who arrive with nothing and within a generation are part of the educated professional class (so much so that the Old Rogue, used to say “If American universities really admitted by merit, there wouldn’t be a single round eye). In Britain, Asians, particularly the Chinese were well regarded as the group that stuck to its corner, prospered (no state handouts) and avoided contentious politics. My stepfather, who works in a hospital in Germany says that unlike many of the other minorities, the “Yellow People,” never went onto German welfare. This same sentiment was echoed by Finnish friends who stated that Japanese and Vietnamese were welcome because they worked hard and kept to themselves.

As an Asian, who grew up in the West, I felt proud that “my people” came to the West with nothing and built something. While this achievement of Asian communities in the west is a good thing, it blinds “us” to the realities to the harsh realities of other communities. When the Black talk about social justice after screwed by the history of slavery, the Asians shrugged with the “so what, we were once poor and made it out – what’s wrong with you,” mentality. Yes, we were fresh off the boat but we didn’t have the conditioning that many American blacks suffered. Contrary to what Ben Carson would argue – slaves were not immigrants.

Being a “model minority,” has given the Asian communities a false sense of security in the status quo and many Asians forget that they too once benefited from the struggles of the African American Community as this clip from the comedian Hassan Minhaj explains:

https://etcanada.com/news/652740/hasan-minhaj-calls-on-fellow-asian-americans-to-stand-with-protesters/

The situation that “dark-skinned” people face is not exactly prejudice free in Asia too. One of the biggest examples of how Asian people are proving to b as awful was from an infamous ad from China, which showed a black man approaching a Chinese girl, who then shoves him into a washing machine, where he emerges Chinese and therefore desirable;

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/28/china-racist-detergent-advert-outrage

With attitudes like these, it’s not surprising that the Chinese in Africa are often regarded as arrogant arseholes (sure, unlike the Western Colonial powers before, there’s no lecture on human rights, but the Chinese are far from liberating heroes).

Over here in Chinese majority, Singapore, we claim to be “multi-racial.” Unfortunately, beneath the lovely exterior, it is politically acceptable to endorse racism. The official line is that, “Singapore’s majority Chinese population is not yet ready for a non-Chinese Prime Minister,” even if the one politician with global credentials and accepted by all races is a non-Chinese.

While it was heartening to see many Singaporeans (including the Chinese ones) open up their hearts and wallets to foreign workers as cases of Covid-19 erupted in the dormitories, an unhealthy number thought nothing of denigrating dark skinned labourers who were doing the work they wouldn’t do.

The only salivation for the Chinese race in this respect is that it’s not the only race in Asia with an issue with the dark skinned. The Indians (many of whom are dark skinned, particularly in the South) also have a strange fixation with trying to get fairer. Take a look at this commercial, staring Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan, which while not as obvious as the Chinese detergent ad, isn’t exactly subtle in its messaging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl7pa4PPqp8

The message is clear. Fair equals handsome, hence if you’re a guy who wants to pick up girls, you invest in skin whitener. I think of one of my best friends, who is a good looking Nepali, who takes great pride in the beauty of his kids because ….they’ve got his colour.

I’d go as far as to argue that it’s almost worse than in the West. While the Western worlds are erupting into violence on the streets, the problems are clear cut. Blacks are clearly being screwed over by the system, particularly the police force. While America is the focus, I’m old enough to remember when the Algerians rioted in Paris and when the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Found Police forces in the UK to have major issues with race. Sure, current leadership hasn’t helped. However, these are problems that can be solved with the obvious – i.e. legislation, money and so on.

In Asia, its almost as if the prejudice against the dark skinned is part of accepted culture. Let’s go back to “fair and handsome.” Think of it, it’s probably not meant to be racist against dark skinned people. It’s just an accepted fact that fair automatically gets equated with handsome. I remember my late grandmother telling me, “These Indian girls are actually pretty – it’s just that they’re dark.”

Changing culture will take time. I think the obvious is to encourage mixed race marriages (or as one Jewish guy said “My dick is not racist”). This will be particularly tough, especially when you consider that most Asian marriages are about families as much as the individuals. Yet, as the Western situation has shown, the prejudice against dark skinned people has to be eradicated to a level where dark skinned people don’t feel that it’s the natural order of things for them to be screwed.

Both the West and Asia need to re look at the way they treat the dark skinned. It’s not just a black and white issue but a human issue that needs to be addressed. Racism and ancient prejudices don’t have a place in the modern world.