Race and ethnicity are not the same thing.

More specifically, the pie chart represents a political ideology: 

• that we primarily know ourselves by the colour of our skin; 
• that it is predictive of our behaviour; and
• that we would or should accept the obligations that come with the classification.

If you're "Malay", a cascade of assumptions and demands follow. If you're "Chinese", a cascade of different assumptions and demands roll over you.

One can see all the above in a letter in the Online Forum of the Straits Times, 11 May 2006, by Wong Hoong Hooi. He was rebutting earlier letters by Janica Chan and Anthony Lee Mui Yu about how cold Singaporeans are towards strangers. I'm not dealing with the subject in question, but I was struck by the way Wong used the word "ethnicity" and the cascade of expectations that was inherent in his sentences.

His letter was titled by the editors thus:

Westernised Chinese S'poreans lack comfort in their own ethnicity and heritage

Wong's letter ended with these words:

... when reader Ms Janica Chan called for practising good Chinese values, she was clearly reminding members of the Chinese Singaporean community to uphold the better aspects of their traditions.

Mr Lee's riposte that Singapore isn't China only underscores the lack of comfort Westernised Chinese Singaporeans have with their ethnicity and heritage.

One who finds it painful to be reminded of his ethnicity would do better to sort out the problem within himself before addressing the issue of 'a mature and cosmopolitan society'.

It is quite obvious from the above that Wong saw all Chinese as belonging to a single ethnic group -- "Chinese". Even when he mentioned "Westernised Chinese Singaporeans" he showed that he expected them to conform to the same norms of the same group. Note the use of the words "heritage" and "traditions".

This is reinforced by his conclusion that Westernised Chinese Singaporeans have a "problem within [themselves]", and that they find it "painful to be reminded" of their ethnicity.

But, hold on there.

Westernised Chinese Singaporeans may be the same race as non-Westernised one, but are they the same ethnic group? Are they therefore expected to display the same cultural patterns and hold the same values? Is it not possible that they could be different without finding it "painful" to be different?

Race is quite simple to understand. It's the way we classify groups of people by their physical characteristics, primarily skin colour, hair characteristics and common facial features.

Singaporeans tend to think that it is very easy to make conclusions about a person's race, but that's only based on our fishbowl experience. In the wider world, it is usually controversial defining the specific races and impossible to tell where one race ends and another begins.

Through social engineering, the Peranakan Chinese, for example, are disappearing as a community. The Boyanese, Bugis, Sundanese and others from the Indonesian archipelago have been collapsed into "Malay".

From the same doctrinal imperative, we have writers who assume that some Singaporeans "lack comfort" with their ethnicity and heritage. It may be true that there is misalignment, but that misalignment is not due to any stubborn refusal by these persons to know themselves. Rather, it is due to the stubborn insistence of the state and self-appointed guardians of racial purity to assign "ethnicity" and heritage to other people. No wonder it doesn't fit!

* * * * *

 
Why is Singapore so hung up about race? Why do we so easily confuse race with ethnicity?

The political answer to those questions lies in Lee Kuan Yew's battle with the UMNO "ultras" during the 2 years that Singapore was part of Malaysia. I have discussed this before in previous essays, and there is no need to cover the subject again. Suffice it to say that it's an obsession we all have to live with.

But even in the decades before that, we more often used the language of race than of ethnicity. In that, we were quite typical of migrant societies.

My rule of thumb is this: migrant societies see race; settled societies see ethnicity.

When different peoples come together from far-off continents and sub-continents, the physical differences are often striking. One group looks completely different from another group with no in-betweens.

Colonial Singapore had 4 starkly different kinds of homo sapiens arriving here. Going by the colour scale, one group was pinkish-white, the Chinese were light tan, those from maritime Southeast Asia were like milk chocolate and those arriving from British India were mostly coffee black, though a few of them were bright blue (the turbans) and heavily moustachioed. You had to be blind not to see the colour and physical distinctions.

Within each group there were ethnic variations, and early colonial records were almost effervescent in their multiplicity. There were the Hockchiew, the Sindhis, the Parsis, the Minang and the Armenians, and maybe a hundred more. Each of them spoke their own language, many of them had distinct variations of their native religions. The Armenians, for example, had their own kind of Christianity and their own church.

But to people from the other races, these ethnic variations seemed minor and incomprehensible. To the Chinese, all Southern Indian languages sounded alike (they don't). To the Malays, all Chinese celebrated Chinese New Year in the same way (they don't). And to all but the pinkish-white, a church is a church.

And so race became the dominant classifier in people's minds -– of other peoples. Within their own racial group, people continued to see ethnicities. For over a hundred years, civil society in the Chinese communities was organised along ethnic and clan lines. The Hokkien had their own associations and schools, the Cantonese theirs.

In settled societies, on the other hand, classifying people by race is meaningless, basically impossible. While there may be physical variations, they tend to be much more subtle. There are also a lot of in-betweens. Consider, for example, the different ethnic groups in countries like India, China, Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines. In such situations, linguistic, religious and cultural traits are more useful markers than physical appearances. They are more predictive of social behaviour. 

The reason for cultural variation rippling over, but not coincident with physical variation is not hard to guess. Either the people mostly came from the same gene stock or if they came from different gene pools, over the centuries there has been a lot of inter-breeding. But cultural influences, including language and religion, never cease washing into any society. Some segments adopt some of these influences while other segments adopt their own cultural innovations, over time creating distinct ethnic sets.

It is a signifier of how Singapore is gradually becoming a settled society that we are increasingly able to discern ethnic groups that are unique to this place. The Singlish and Singdarin-speaking Chinese with a Hokkien underlay and an American pop-culture overlay is an emerging ethnic group. The inaccuracy of seeing them merely as "Chinese" (the pink 76% of the pie chart above) has been shown up by the appearance of the real Chinese in Singapore -– the new migrants from China. That even Malays and Indians can tell the two groups apart indicates that the ethnic distinction is substantial.

Another group that is just beginning to emerge is that of the English-speaking Malays. Just last night I saw 2 Malay teenagers happily conversing in English and then struggling to answer a few questions in Malay when an older woman approached them for directions. This group is still in their first generation, but 30 years from now, their cultural and value systems will be much altered by the way language will have oriented them to the West.

They are shadowing a change that a segment of the Indians and Chinese made a generation ago. Families that are predominantly Singlish- or English-speaking now make up about half of these racial groups. With language change came changes in social customs, values and worldviews. They are disproportionately Christian, but as much as religion changes them, they in turn reshape their religions. Many have remarked on the ways that a new generation of English-speaking Singaporeans are remaking Buddhism from one that was ritual-heavy to a more intellectual quest.

So, far from being unchanging like race, ethnicity is characterised by constant flux. And individuals tend to be comfortable in whatever group, subgroup, sub-subgroup or inter-group they inhabit, at whatever point in time. The people who are uncomfortable, pace Wong Hoong Hooi, are those who refuse to accept that the ethnic map of Singapore is nothing at all like the pie chart above, but a much more complex tapestry like the diagram below.

Of course it is not exhaustive. I've surely left out some possibilities, but do have some fun with it. Try to pinpoint where you, your parents and grandparents, stand within this map. Myself, I think I'm at location K-22 in the blue zone.