Playing with Fire
When I saw the news about two bloggers being charged with sedition, my immediate response was that they shouldn’t have played with fire. It was not so much about them showing clear defiance towards authority, but rather, making those racist statements.
We naturally gravitate towards people who share similar traits with us, and we tend to keep our distance from people we perceive to be different. I suspect it’s the way we’re biologically wired. Let’s face it, we humans are weak creatures. We may have huge brains, allowing us to invent tools and weapons which help to reduce our physical shortcomings, but only in groups do we truly feel safe. Don’t believe it? Try getting lost in a foreign country with no way of communicating with the locals. The sense of relief you feel when you meet someone who speak or understand your language is indescribable. However, this should not be used to justify or rationalise racism.
We don’t fear people who are different from us; rather, we fear the unknown. If we see a man talking to himself on the street, we avoid him because we have no idea whether he’s a dangerous man or not. And when we stories about him having a history of violence, perhaps sentencing to 20 years in prison for butchering his wife, we begin to make assumptions based on our own observations and baseless rumours, and let our imaginations run wild. Soon every action of him seems suspicious, and we’re always ready to make a run or hit him on his head with our handbags whenever he approaches.
However, if we see him everyday and know that he’s just a harmless guy who behaves in an unusual way, we’ll walk pass him without taking a second glance, brushing aside any ridiculous rumours about him. Such are the powers of ignorance and knowledge.
The focus of promoting racial harmony shouldn’t be about tolerance; it must be about understanding cultures and traditions different from ours, and accept them as a way of life. Having the good fortune of being able to travel to many different parts of the world, I realise no matter how seemingly different we appear physically, culturally, or even racially, we have more in common than we imagined. After all, 99.9% of the human DNA sequences are exactly the same in all people.
Lessons from history are painfully clear. Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust; and the survival rate for the European Jewry are just one in three. Nazi propaganda aimed at spreading anti-Semitism played no small part in this human tragedy. We should also not forget the causes and consequences of the racial riots in Singapore back in 1964.
Beware of anyone making racist remarks to further personal or political agendas. I’ll leave you with a quote from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee:
The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he is any colour of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it — whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.