{"id":678,"date":"2014-10-05T16:53:24","date_gmt":"2014-10-05T08:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamincheah.wordpress.com\/?p=678"},"modified":"2014-10-05T16:53:24","modified_gmt":"2014-10-05T08:53:24","slug":"diversity-is-not-skin-deep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/?p=678","title":{"rendered":"Diversity is not skin-deep"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading this story<\/a> on Quartz, I almost thought\u00a0the writer, Pooja Makhijani,\u00a0was talking about real issues. Issues like the greying population, the government’s ongoing attempts to leverage Big Data for its ends, the future of political expression in Singapore, a vulnerable economy dependent on maritime entrep\u00f4t trade and imports. Instead, the author spoke about lack of racial diversity in local literature, leading\u00a0into Chinese privilege.<\/p>\n

I would recommend Ms Makhijani\u00a0hie herself to different libraries and bookstores and look more closely. If she cares for South Asian\u00a0protagonists, she can look for \u00a0A Candle or the Sun <\/em>and\u00a0Moonrise, Sunset\u00a0<\/em>by Gopal Baratham, as well as the Inspector Singh series by Shamini Flint. Alfian Sa’at’s\u00a0Malay Sketches<\/em>\u00a0and Isa Kamari’s One Earth\u00a0<\/em>capture stories from the Malay community, and Rex Shelley won fame for writing about Eurasians. Michael Chiang’s\u00a0Army Daze\u00a0<\/i>has a multiracial cast of characters, while\u00a0The Steampowered Globe<\/em>\u00a0has characters from different races and nationalities, and\u00a0Stella Kon’s\u00a0Star Sapphire<\/em>\u00a0posits a future in which humanity becomes so racially intermingled that from a human perspective the only races of note are humans and other extraterrestrials. If Makhijani\u00a0insists on children’s stories, she will find bountiful material in\u00a0Singapore Children’s Favorite Stories<\/em>,\u00a0There was a Peranakan Woman Who Lived In a Shoe,\u00a0<\/em>and tales of the Singapore Bookworm Gang. And these are just the stories written in English.<\/p>\n

Talking about ‘Chinese privilege’ in\u00a0Singapore literature is clearly a non-starter. But let’s go deeper and explore racial representation — or, indeed, anything that falls under the\u00a0popular\u00a0liberal progressive\u00a0use of ‘diversity’.<\/p>\n

Take a society where people are judged by their deeds, not their skin colour. The content of their hearts, not the cultural baggage ascribed to their race. The willingness to work with other people in the present, not however much their long-dead ancestors\u00a0have been oppressed or have oppressed others. In this hypothetical society, the good will rise and the mediocre will sink. In such a society, race is merely an accident of birth — mostly irrelevant to day-to-day matters.<\/p>\n

Now take another society where the worthiness of institutions, works of art, organisations and causes are judged by their commitment to racial diversity. One where the important thing is that alleged minorities are properly represented. Such a society would naturally prioritise ‘diversity’ over character. Such a society would, by nature, be racist.<\/p>\n

The Merriam-Webster\u00a0Dictionary says racism is:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Any action, practice, or belief that reflects the racial worldview\u2014the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called \u201craces,\u201d that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral features, and that some \u201craces\u201d are innately superior to others.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The focus on Chinese privilege reflects the belief that there are separate and exclusive biological entities called ‘races’, of which ‘Chinese’ is one such race, that the Chinese race possesses inherent traits that elevate them above\u00a0other races, and that this is undesirable. By tacking on the undesirability of ‘privilege’, it becomes socially acceptable to be racist.<\/p>\n

By focusing on Chinese privilege, Makhijani\u00a0is displaying her racism. By lamenting the lack of ‘brown faces’, she\u00a0implies a believe that there is a\u00a0race defined by brown skin coloration with innate traits distinct from other people, which means she is a racist. By judging a country by its racial makeup, and its body of literature by the skin colour of protagonists, she has demonstrated herself as a racist.<\/p>\n

As shown above, racism is\u00a0not simply<\/em> about treating a race better than or equal to other races. It is about believing\u00a0that race itself has a kind of value and judging people and organisations on that basis.\u00a0That Makhijani’s\u00a0racism happens to fall under the subcategory of reverse racism — one that is aimed against an allegedly superior race — makes her no less a racist than someone who sings the praises of or criticises people of a specific race. Instead of talking of specific achievements, actions, standards, anything that can be held up to standards, Makhijani is choosing the easy approach, judging people by the colour of their skin and not their actions.<\/p>\n

As a writer, the word ‘diversity’ has always stuck in my craw. ‘Diversity’, in my experience, is simply reverse racism or reverse bigotry. It means elevating works solely because their characters happen to be the oppressed minority of the day, that stories\u00a0are predominantly about hammering home the politically correct message du jour,\u00a0<\/em>and that everything else from craft to plot to characterisation to world-building mean little to nothing at all. To celebrate the ‘diversity’ of innate unchangeable traits — gender, race, sexuality — is to praise superficiality and treat people as little more than products\u00a0of their genes and history\u00a0instead of living, breathing, people.<\/em> What matters is diversity of\u00a0experience<\/em>. Of\u00a0character<\/em>. Of the choices and divergences that spin into seven billion life paths, that things that truly make every person an\u00a0individual<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you take a collection of straight Chinese male physicists\u00a0and insert a transgender Malay female physicist, you’re still getting a bunch of physicists, with no indication that any one of them is able to think outside the standard model and uncover the data that will reconcile classical and quantum mechanics. Chances are good that all you are getting are people who think in similar ways, and indeed the liberals and progressives I have seen talk a good game about ‘diversity’ and\u00a0seemingly march in lockstep, and descend on nonconformists and critics like harpies. \u00a0True diversity is to insert a home-schooled savant, a Catholic priest, a New Age philosopher, someone whose choices and experiences lead them to view the world in a different light. \u00a0It is this, the cross-fertilisation of fields and the ability to bring multiple seeming disparate areas of expertise together, that lead to creativity, industry and the progress of humanity. Diversity of experience,\u00a0not<\/em> diversity of race or gender or anything but that which is relevant.<\/p>\n

In closing, as a writer, it would be remiss of me to mention my own stories. First, let me describe them by Ms Makhijani’s metrics:<\/p>\n

In November, an independent publishing house will be publishing a\u00a0short story I wrote, which features a female Caucasian and a male of indeterminate racial origin.\u00a0American Sons<\/em> stars a white-Hispanic protagonist. My upcoming novel\u00a0Keepers of the Flame <\/em>has\u00a0another white-Hispanic protagonist, and other main characters include a Hispanic, a Japanese female, a black man, two Chinese males, a white man, and a non-human being.\u00a0I have recently completed another short story, featuring a protagonist of Sanskrit descent, and if this works out other characters will include a representative range of human and non-human entities. Yet another story features a gender-indeterminate\/currently-female protagonist collaborating with a Brazilian, a Caucasian, and an Arab. My Singaporean stories include two Chinese males, a Chinese woman, an Indian woman, and divine and infernal creatures from\u00a0Abrahamic, Norse, Hindu and Buddhist traditions. After I complete the\u00a0American Heirs <\/em>series, the next flagship series will star humans, a svartalf, werewolves, a dragon and other creatures.<\/p>\n

By these descriptions alone, I have hit just about every diversity marker of the day. But I have also told you absolutely nothing about the stories themselves — often, not even the titles. So let’s try again:<\/p>\n

In November, an independent publishing house will be publishing a short story I wrote about a dogged journalist interviewing a shell-shocked soldier accused of war crimes in the middle of an undeclared conflict zone.\u00a0American Sons<\/em>\u00a0tells the story of Master Sergeant Christopher Miller’s race to stop a terrorist organisation from destroying the Republic of Cascadia, the last bastion of civilisation in North America.\u00a0Keepers of the Flame<\/em> shows the conflict expanding across\u00a0the\u00a0continent, with the Republic of Cascadia trying to fight an emergent terrorist threat, a new American Empire marching to the west, and a nascent artificial intelligence rising from the chaos. Another short story\u00a0features a rookie secret policeman who must choose between the laws he serves and his personal ethics, which will come to define his series, tentatively titled Apes and Angels<\/em>. The other short story has a team of paramilitary agents\/terrorists raiding a top-secret corporate lab to uncover an illegal neural and physiological modification experiment — only to find that things aren’t what they seem to be. If this works out, this will introduce a hard space opera series. My (abortive) Michael Chang series follows a young magician’s journey as he is called by the gods to do battle for humanity, and if I ever pick up the series again I have a template for future stories. And the next flagship series, working title\u00a0Cybermancer<\/em>, follows a small group of unlikely allies — a former magician-turned-cyborg private peace officer, a full-cyborg deputy marshal, a gifted craftswoman, former Special Operations personnel human and otherwise\u00a0— as they try to hold back and reverse\u00a0a collapse of civilisation wrought by the collision of globalisation, technology and magic.<\/p>\n

Looking over the two portfolios would tell you which is more interesting, and why. And this is why I cannot subscribe to notions of diversity that goes no deeper than the skin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diversity of choices and experience matters. Diversity of race, or of any other innate characteristic, is reverse bigotry when irrelevant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,32],"tags":[235,242,288,341],"class_list":["post-678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-better-world","category-uncategorized","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-singapore","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kitsuncheah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}