I am heartened by Dr Maliki Osman's call in Parliament (S'poreans need to accept differences across races and discuss issues in constructive way, says Maliki, ST Online, Sept 3).
Heeding his call to approach these differences constructively, I offer two suggestions. First, the public service should take the lead in boldly acknowledging race differences, and make a clear commitment to work with researchers to understand why these differences exist.
In my own experience doing research on Singapore as a social scientist, I have consistently received suggestions to downplay or remove references to racial differences when discussing my findings in public. These suggestions come not just from public servants, but also from fellow researchers or corporate communications practitioners who are concerned about reputational risks from mentioning race in any way.
What is remarkable is that none of the findings in question seem especially sensitive - they usually concern a topic like race differences in health among older adults.
If the Minister in the Prime Minister's Office is serious about acknowledging differences across racial groups, then we must first work to systematically remove these out-of-bounds markers, often put in place by public agencies.
Suppressing genuine research and knowledge about race differences can only stunt our conversations around race.
Second, Dr Maliki must realise that the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) model is quickly becoming outdated.
While holding a strong racial identity does not preclude also having a strong Singaporean identity, we must not ignore the changing demographic reality.
Data from the Department of Statistics show that transnational and inter-racial marriages have increased over the past decade to 34.5 per cent and 21.7 per cent in 2017 respectively.
Assuming these categories do not overlap, this means that children from more than half of Singapore marriages already do not easily fit the CMIO model.
The proportion of mixed-race citizens in the population is likely to grow substantially.
Singapore has allowed double-barrelled races on identity cards since 2011, but this is largely cosmetic.
Many of our policies seem to force mixed-race persons into one race category when applied in practice, without fully recognising that being of mixed-race may come with challenges that are separate from either of their constituent races.
The CMIO model needs to be relooked not because we are trying to abandon our racial identities, but simply because the diversity of our racial identities will soon outgrow the rigid CMIO categories.
Shannon Ang (Dr)
