In Continuum.

White doll. Black doll.

Societal taboos are aplenty in today's context, there are things that we are not allowed to talk about simply because of the sensitivity of the issue involved. You can't talk about religion, because questioning somebody else's faith isn't something someone else wants to hear. It is OK for you to dislike a certain religion, all the society asks of you is for you to keep your ideas to yourself. Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself, they'd tell you, and everybody is happy at the end of the day. Like religion, racial issues isn't something people want to talk about, and it is certainly something that we condemn in my society. They tell us to learn about other cultures, to understand their traditions, all of those in the confines of a classroom with its students carefully chosen so as to fulfill a certain quota of children from each race. That is how careful our government is when it comes to ensuring a certain racial balance in our society, like some laboratory experiment that involves highly flammable substances. Only the right amount would produce the correct reaction, too much or too little would cause, well, you don't want to know.

It is evident in school when the government decided to make it a subject to learn in school. They called it Civics and Moral Education, or CME for short. It was a lesson that nobody quite liked to have simply because of how mundane and common sensical everything was. Every story in the textbook that involved multiple characters would have an indian, a malay, and a chinese boy or girl, depending on the context. Your neighbors are also going to have a mix of indians, malays and chinese, and that's all because the government doesn't want to have a single race to dominate an apartment block anywhere on the island. That is their way of having a racial balance in Singapore, and so far it has worked out rather well. I have my fair share of malay and indian friends, and some of them have been the nicest people that I have ever met in my life too. If you were to skim pass the surface of things, it'd be easy to deduce that Singapore has certainly done a fabulous job in ensuring a certain level of peace and harmony, a certain plane of understanding in between the races. Still, underneath it all, there is an underlying state of racism that we just cannot get rid. It just feels to be ingrained in our genes, something which that cannot be unlearned no matter how hard we try. 

It's strange how the government condemns and punishes racism offenders, and yet there are blatant racism that goes unchecked under the government's watchful eyes. There are schools in Singapore that do not allow indians or malay students at all, just because they proclaimed themselves to be "chinese" schools. My high school was an all chinese school for some reason, and the only indian in the entire school was forced to learn mandarin. For four years, I've never shared the classroom with an indian friend, or discussed my homework with a malay friend. Everybody was chinese in my classroom, and the class next to mine, and the classes after that. It is not something done exclusively by my school though, a lot of other "elitist" schools in Singapore does the very same thing, as if to say that indian and malay students are just not smart enough, that they are not bright enough to make the cut. 

Even in the army, malays were blatantly kicked out of various vocations such as the air force and the armored units simply because of their religion. I was from an armored unit back in those days, and I couldn't find a single malay in my camp at all, nor in all the other armored units around Singapore. The reason really is because the country's closest neighbor also happens to be its greatest enemy. With that side of the straits being a muslim country, the loyalties of the malay citizens in Singapore are doubtful. That is why they are usually prevented from holding key roles in the army, and those roles being left only to the abled and capable chinese and indian officers, never the malays. Such racism can be accommodated for some reason, but all the other racism cannot. It is just a little absurd on my part, to see how a government can stand under the flag of unity and justice, when they also have such double standards on the race issue in the country. I suppose this form of racism has been harbored by the people as being something natural, something which can be overlooked because the authorities aren't not doing anything to condemn it. That is how problems get swept under the rug, that is how they also become blown out of proportions in the future.

An experiment was done in regards to the significance of racial issues to small children, an experiment which you can see in the video below. All the black children in the video pointed out that the black doll, not the white doll, is the bad doll, is the ugly doll. The white doll is the good and prettier doll simply because it is whiter. The look in their faces when they were asked which doll they looked like was just heart wrenching on my part, and there are a dozen other similar experiments you can find online in regards to this form of subtle racism that exists in our society. It is strange and disconcerting to see how even innocent children have learned to hate their own race somehow, how they have already learned that the whiter you are, the more superior you are to all the other races. So much effort has been put into narrowing the racial divide all around the world, but how far have we come really? How much has changed over the years? 

It was in the toys that we played and the books that we read. When I was younger, my sister never played with any black Barbie dolls because they were all white. Barbie was white, Ken was white, and that only changed a couple of years after my sister decided to quit it altogether. I don't remember a single Lego figurine being black either, and the only black Lego men were the bad guys somehow. The knights in shiny armor were always white, while the evil knights were always dressed in black, and it was more than just a battle of ideologies but rather a battle of skin colors back then. In the books that we read, somehow all the characters were white unless specifically mentioned. Older Disney animations were also dominated by white characters somehow, if you haven't noticed it yet. All the princesses were white, save for Jasmine who was supposed to be Arabic. Still, she just looked like a white princess with darker skin, and that is the kind of message that we have been feeding our children for as long as these characters have been in existence. You need to be white to be a princess, you need to be white to be the good guy, you need to be white to be better. 

Look for a book right now, make sure that it is written by someone outside of Asia. What is the skin color of the author of the book when you look at it? The same can be said about any names that we come across from a foreign medium, somehow the skin colors are always white until being proven otherwise. At least that is the problem that I have, something which I cannot shake off no matter how hard I try. It's just disturbing how these information has been gradually fed to us via the media that we have grown so accustomed to these subtle racism all of a sudden. Nobody taught us to hate the black doll, nobody taught us to think that every author in this world is a white author. Somehow, however, that's what we think and that is what we have grown so used to. It may be funny in films when they talk about how the black man always dies first, even racist jokes may be funny in school every once in a while if it is done for the sake of humor and nothing else. Still, I suppose a problem such as racism begins with one joke, and then it leads to something far worse after that. 

It may be undetectable now, everything may seem to be working out fine. But it only takes a spark to ignite the whole haystack, and who is going to be responsible when that happens? What if our children become involved in such racial tensions in the future, what if they become victims? Or, what if they become the instigator simply because they have been brought up to think that white people are better than the black people. I know, they are just stupid little plastic dolls. But if the children are able to learn such hatred without being taught, imagine how it'd be like if somebody does decide to exploit this blind hatred in the future. It'd be more than just hating the black doll. It'd become an urge to dispose of it. Imagine that day, and then imagine you to have the same skin color as the black doll. Imagine that.