SINGAPORE – Even as Singapore aspires to be a race-blind society, it must always acknowledge that it is going to be a work in progress, said Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Edwin Tong on Saturday.
“The reality is that we are all, by human nature, very tribal,” he said, adding that people usually find common ground by race, religion, language, or even their love for food.
He was speaking at the first Y-ChatRPT youth dialogue held at One Punggol Community Hub.
The idea for the dialogue arose from a survey conducted by the People’s Association Youth Movement (PAYM) in 2022 to understand what racial harmony means to young people in Singapore.
Around 2,000 people took part in the survey.
Y-ChatRPT was named after the top keywords distilled from the survey, which were Respect, Peace and Together.
Mr Tong addressed around 150 participants in the audience, who were aged 15 to 35. They comprised students, those in the workforce, and community volunteers.
“We made this work in spite of the differences that we had. We inherited a racially diverse community. We inherited a religiously diverse community. And we set out to make it work by doing some things that many other countries in the world don’t have,” he said.
For example, Singapore put into its Constitution that the government of the day has to look out for racial and religious minorities.
“Every government, whoever is the government, will have to conform with that,” said Mr Tong.
“It is not the natural order of things, but we decided as a country to make sure that we protect, preserve and advance the position of minorities.”
But he pointed out that there are limits to what the Government alone can accomplish, and called on civil society leaders to think about what they can do to make things work.
“We can only set the parameters. We can tell people what you can’t do – you can’t go and stand on a soapbox and criticise other religions... but we can’t tell you to make friends, we can’t tell you what to do, we can’t tell you how to behave.”
Singapore has to move from religious tolerance to understanding, and eventually to religious “embracement”, he added.
He asked participants to engage in self-reflection, and ask themselves how they can change their personal outlook when it comes to race and religion.
Drawing on Saturday’s dialogue, PAYM will gather 100,000 different voices from young people over the next three months, through both physical and virtual channels, to put together a vision of how a racially and religiously harmonious Singapore could look like.
For participants, the dialogue is a step in the right direction.
Institute of Technical Education College West student Vadali Nikhil, 17, told The Straits Times: “Dialogues like these help as they create a positive mindset about races in Singapore. They change our mindsets – how we thought about races before, and how we can think about it now.”
Dunman High School student Stella Tan, 17, said: “Conversations about race and religion are important, especially among youth.”
Mr Luo Chen Jun, 34, from start-up accelerator Antler, said that talking about these topics alone is not enough, “but these conversations allow me to (consider) what I can do as an individual to make someone’s day better”.
