De jure segregation (enforced by law) is racist. De facto segregation is not, but racist public policies and institutionalized racism can be major factors in shaping de facto segregation, in addition to 'tribal instincts'. That said, de facto segregation exists to one degree or another in all societies in the world today, even in the most vibrant, progressive, cosmopolitan cities, especially re residential neighbourhoods.
In the absence of de jure segregation, wherein lies the need for a 'desegregation' policy? In fact, 'desegregation' policies have been ignominiously used as a cover by tyrannical regimes worldwide to disband minority communities and locales of political resistance deemed inimical to the regime's interests.
This statement is in essential agreement with what I was saying. Erasing clan and ancestral regional fault lines and imposing a supra-identity allows for a more homogeneous voting bloc which can be manipulated to entrench PAP's power.
True, but LKY was a non-Mandarin, non-dialect speaking banana. (He only learned Mandarin and Hokkien after he entered the political arena.) To the degree that this zero contact with Chinese in his formative years had alienated him from the emotional and psycho-cultural underpinnings of the language, he probably under-estimated the impact of the Speak Mandarin Campaign and the eradication of Chinese-stream education on Chinese Singaporeans, even as he used these deculturating policies for political ends.
It was something that had puzzled me too, back in the eighties and early nineties when a lot of my minority friends – Indians & Eurasians; Malays didn't have the means – emigrated to Australia and NZ because of diminished employment prospects.
Their explanation was that the campaign had had a trickle down effect: the vast machinery used to encourage Mandarin and de-emphasize dialects had led to a generation of Chinese moving away from using dialects and pasar Melayu as a lingua franca towards using Mandarin. The upshot was that English standards suffered, more Chinese used Mandarin among themselves, and private sector employers (SMEs in the large) started insisting on Mandarin as a prerequisite for job applications. When 75% of your customers are Chinese, you'd want to do business in their language.
32 years ago, at the height of PAP's dominance, an Indian man won an historic by-election in a Chinese-majority constituency and defended it successfully 3 years later.
58 years ago, a Jewish man won his constituency in a three-way fight against 2 Chinese candidates and led his party to victory in Singapore's first Legislative Assembly elections. He became our first Chief Minister.
And you're saying a minority candidate can't get elected today on his own merit?
I didn't write the paper. The resale market is an abomination of the public housing system, and completely undermines the fundamental tenets on which the raison d'être of public housing is based. For Chinese, Malays and everyone else.
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