Apart from being observed in schools, Racial Harmony Day, which falls today, passes largely unnoticed by most people. July 21, 1964, was the day when the first of two race riots within six weeks took place in Singapore, leading eventually to 36 deaths and injuries to more than 500 people that year. That dark moment etched itself into the memory of that generation, which became acutely aware of the existential need to avoid a repetition of violent racial and religious discord. The riots of 1964 remain a national marker of Singapore's progress towards Independence the following year. The enshrinement of multiracialism as a central pillar of state policy has lasted since then. Equally important, most Singaporeans have accepted the need for racial and religious harmony and have internalised its workings in everyday life. In a sense, therefore, it is a welcome sign that July 21 has become an unexceptional day on the Singapore calendar.

However, race continues to be a force that can be used to divide Singaporeans, especially in this day and age of misinformation and influence operations. Ethnicity can be a force for national integration, but only so long as it operates within the firm parameters of an inclusive nationhood. No one has to cease being Chinese, Malay, Indian or Eurasian in order to be Singaporean. The problem occurs when the sense of the nation is subsumed to global ethnicities whose ambit is of course larger than the borders of an island city-state. The danger lies in the centrifugal attraction that identity politics can exercise on excitable minds at a time of global transformation marked by the rise of powers with long and illustrious ancestries. The ethnic footprint of those powers is deep. How they use their access to Singaporean minds will affect the state of racial harmony here. Singapore must be prepared for the eventuality that they will do so.