About 2
weeks ago, I posted this status update on Facebook. Originally just a result of
my personal reflections, the lecture given by Ms Karen Oliver last Thursday
resurfaced my interest in the issue, and I decided to further explore it on one
of my blog posts. I wanted to examine the way in which national identity and
culture, seen as the basis of xenophobia, is akin to racism, as both are based
on socially constructed cultural categories and lead to discrimination and
prejudice, albeit according to seemingly different criteria.
I found
this comment by Shah Salimat (2013), a blogger writing for Yahoo! News
Singapore
(http://sg.news.yahoo.com/comment--xenophobia-and-the-jollibee-backlash-153822168.html)
very relevant. He refers to the outburst of seemingly xenophobic sentiment in
response to the opening of a new Philippines fast food chain, Jollibee, in
Singapore, and attempts to find a rational historical and political explanation
for this phenomena. He states that race has been institutionalised in
Singapore, and the fixed Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others categories present
throughout Singaporean politics have led to the hostile reactions to an influx
of foreigners who fail to fit easily within these stereotypical categories. One
interesting point that he raises is that "racialisation's one-way view is
akin to the heart-thumping message of nationalism, and nationalism is too
easily labeled as xenophobia". My question to this would be, how great,
really, is the distinction between racialisation, nationalism, and xenophobia?
And is this a difference that is perceived to be greater than it really is?
Lentin and
Titley (2011) argue that while racism is assumed to be non-existent in
current-day politics, it is still present, albeit masquerading as cultural
prejudice and discrimination. They suggest that although racial language has
fallen out of use in the Western context, the concepts and ideas of race still
persist in the Western imagination. One way in which they describe it to exist
is in the shape of a preservation of national culture and "shared
values". In Salimat's comment, (2013) he mentions the semantic move from
the use of "multi-racial" to "multi-cultural" in political
discourse. This evidences how race is substituted for culture, as Lentin and
Titley (2011) have pointed out. However, Salimat (2013) does recognise the need
for "understanding how races think and act" even with this shift of
emphasis on "melding cultures".
Some, such
as Christopher Caldwell (cited by Lentin and Titley, 2011: 52) limit racism to
being "tied to skin color and phenotype" and therefore exclude other
bases of discrimination from its definitive categories. This frees him to make
arguments that oppose cultural difference and which paint negatively the
effects of immigration. He therefore argues for what can be called the 'Muslim
problem' (2011: 51), caused by the increase in Muslim immigrants to Europe. According
to Lentin and Titley (2011: 61), Caldwell argues that “immigration… corrodes
European civilisation from the inside”. This argument is problematic because firstly,
it stereotypes the nature of immigrants as “natural, inherent, and homogenous”
(Lentin and Titley, 2011: 62).
Secondly,
the concept of a constant, “European civilisation” is based on the fictive
concept of national culture. Benedict Anderson (1983) defines nationhood as an
imaginary and constructed concept. It is therefore problematic to base one’s
arguments against immigration on the maintenance of a ‘national culture’,
whether ‘European civilisation’ or ‘Singaporean culture’.
Whether using
the basis of national culture or race, both arguments against immigration are
likewise untenable and problematic.
Bibliography
Anderson, B.
(1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Lentin, A., &
Titley, G. (2011). The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal
age. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Salimat, S. (2013,
March 13). COMMENT: Xenophobia and the Jollibee backlash. Retrieved from
Yahoo News Singapore:
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/comment--xenophobia-and-the-jollibee-backlash-153822168.html
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