#8: In Defence of Killjoys (thank you Sara Ahmed)
Once again, I make the case for being angry.
When I was a younger adult, I had the reputation of being the buzzkill in my friend group. I was the person you couldn’t make jokes about race in front of. I’d call out sexist comments. You get where I’m going with this. My opinions haven’t changed over the years – if anything, they’ve gotten more radical – but I no longer keep those friends. Yes, I have no problem with comfortably residing in my echo chamber. It’s fine! It actually does me no good to surround myself with people who don’t share the same fundamental values as me. I obviously still believe in the merits of discussion and education (I wouldn’t write this newsletter otherwise) but I have no qualms with keeping my social circle the way it is.
I didn’t cut anybody out of my life. There weren’t any large confrontations. The most dramatic response I had was a series of text messages where I expressed my disappointment in a friend’s opinions. I simply stopped showing up for social events where I knew I’d meet abrasive people and stopped trying to shrink myself in order to better fit in. The theorist Sara Ahmed writes about the figure of the “feminist killjoy” a lot in her work and it’s been very helpful for me in understanding this experience.
I’m quoting from “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness” here –
Say I am happy about your happiness, and your happiness is with x. If I share x, then your happiness and my happiness are not only shared but can accumulate through being returned. Or I can simply disregard x: if my happiness is directed just toward your happiness, and you are happy about x, the exteriority of x can disappear or cease to matter (although it can reappear). In cases where I am also affected by x and I do not share your happiness with x, I might become uneasy and ambivalent, since I am made happy by your happiness but I am not made happy by what makes you happy. The exteriority of x would then announce itself as a point of crisis: I want your happiness to be what makes me happy, but I am reminded that even if my happiness is conditional on yours, your happiness is conditional on x and I am not happy with x. In order to preserve the happiness of all, we might even conceal from ourselves our unhappiness with x or try to persuade ourselves that x matters less than the happiness of the other who is made happy by x.
It’s a pretty wordy paragraph so this is how Ahmed sums it up in a later section –
We become alienated when we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as being good.
One of the sources of happiness in Singapore is the fiction of racial harmony. Once you trouble that belief, you are “destroying something that is thought of by others not as only being good but as the cause of happiness”. In general Singaporean society, the opposite of “racial harmony” is thought to be “racial strife”. Don’t misunderstand me. When I call racial harmony a “fiction”, I’m not saying that the actual situation is one of unrest. I do think, however, that the state-sanctioned image of racial harmony is one that assumes each ethnic group is treated fairly and has equal access to opportunities. I don’t believe that is true. I think that ethnic minorities in Singapore face both structural and individual discrimination. The narrative of racial harmony attempts to paper over that reality and that’s why I’ve called it fictitious.
If you belong to a minority group in Singapore or you’re just generally aware of the ways in which ethnic minorities are disadvantaged here, you probably won’t experience pleasure from conversations about national unity or racial harmony that don’t acknowledge the structural reality here. These are all just a lot of words to say that it’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to not be nice to racists or (if you’re hedging here) people who say racist things.
A few months ago, I was interviewed by a local media outlet about anti-racist activism and got into a very frustrating conversation with a Chinese journalist. They were well-meaning but had come at the conversation from a perspective I couldn’t agree with. The story they were chasing was about activists and whether or not knowing how to “speak social justice” is a “form of privilege in itself”. (I am quoting directly.) The line of questioning that I received was all about my family, my education, my class background and I got the distinct sense that they were trying to find proof that I was lucky to be able to articulate myself publicly about social justice issues. My parents didn’t go to university nor are they activists and my “social justice awakening” was through Tumblr (like many other people who were teens in the aughts) so I wouldn’t attribute it to the schools I went to or having “woke” parents. I will say, for the sake of being transparent, that having access to certain spaces like universities helped me learn vocabulary and sharpen my views with like-minded peers. However, the conversation that I was having with the journalist centred around the idea that only the privileged dare to speak up. This notion is not only untrue but is also insulting to the scores of activists who do incredible work with limited access to resources.
The journalist kept asking me how activists could make it easier for people who are “scared” (another direct quote) to participate in conversations about social justice. They were speaking for people who, in their estimation, did not feel they had a space where they could “comfortably ask questions or disagree without feeling penalised for their ignorance”. Again, I think the journalist meant well. However, it was hard for me to interpret the conversation as anything but “how do anti-racist activists make it easier for Chinese people to join the conversation?”.
An op-ed of a similar slant was recently published in Rice. The writer had translated a letter from Chinese-language newspaper Zaobao and posted it on Facebook. If you haven’t seen the letter, it is plainly racist. It ascribes the high rate of coronavirus infection among the migrant worker population to their personal hygiene practices instead of structural issues like the overcrowding of dormitories. In her op-ed, the writer recounts how her Chinese parents were initially in agreement with the Zaobao letter until she had a conversation with them about why it perpetuated racist rhetoric. The writer then goes on to fret about “echo chambers” and to suggest that the “mob of social justice” should put down its “pitchforks” and instead approach the act of education with “love”.
Well-meaning Chinese liberals are quick to respond to so-called “angry activists” with “yes well how do we change people’s minds? You can’t be angry at them, it won’t work.” But I can’t help but wonder why people’s minds were made up on the wrong side of racism in the first place. I suspect that a culture of tolerance is the reason why these beliefs are able to proliferate. Your average Malay or Indian Singaporean understands the stakes of racism intuitively whether or not they’ve ever heard the term “Chinese privilege”. That understanding comes from existing in Singapore as an ethnic minority and just being observant. Saying that “we”, the non-racist, need to slowly coax the racists out of their comfort zone is tacitly accepting that our society is a comfortable one for racist opinions. I’m not okay with that.
We have a public press that feels justified in publishing a racist letter in the name of free speech. (I shouldn’t have to point out why Singapore’s press being a champion of free speech is ironic…) Why did Zaobao even publish the letter? It is true that there will always be racists among us but there are some things we don’t say in polite company. Why is racism something that exists within the grey area of permission? It is, I think, because we don’t have public conversations about what constitutes racism and why it is so harmful. Any prodding to the status quo is marked dangerous. Just look at the sort of backlash that Preeti and Subhas Nair have faced for their speech and contrast it with the consequences that actual racists have faced.
Joy and love are often used as smokescreens for issues that people should be paying attention to. I suspect it will happen a lot more during this crisis. It’s okay if you don’t want to participate in mass singalongs or fly the flag or other demonstrations of patriotism right now. You’re not disrupting any peace by redirecting attention to the human rights crisis that’s happening in the dormitories. If you’re angry, stay angry. Righteous anger gets stuff done! Keep speaking out. We are all ostensibly fighting for the same things – a society free of racism. I have no issues with people who’ve decided that they’d like to achieve that through pleases and thank yous. That’s their prerogative. But I think we’ve had enough of Chinese people in Singapore asking activists and minorities to be nicer to racists. If someone is only going to change their (racist) point of view because of the tone of the message and not its content… then I don’t think they actually get it. There is a lot to be said for tolerance as a virtue but I’m not interested in tolerating racism.
A Short Note
There’s actually quite a lot of race-related news in Singapore at the moment. The pandemic has not stopped racism. 😿 I have a couple of other pieces in draft form that should be published when I’ve cleared some deadlines from my actual jobs. Some people have sent me racist posts/articles that they’d like to see me respond to. I really appreciate your interest in my writing! I can’t respond to all of these requests because people produce stupid takes faster than I can write. If you like my work and would like to help free up some of my time so I can focus on the newsletter more, here’s my ko-fi page. Thank you!
Further Reading
Sara Ahmed’s article is here. If you are a National Library member (anyone with a Singaporean IC is), you have access to JSTOR for free.
A longread from Kirsten Han about the coronavirus outbreak in the migrant worker population. A translation can be found here if you’d like to share it with friends and family who feel more comfortable reading in Chinese.
You can continue to donate to aid organisations doing important work for migrant workers here and here.
Preeti (who I will always be a fan of) has done a topical cover of that singalong song.
And, if you’re trying to get the National Day song out of your head, this is what I’ve been putting on recently to destress.