It is not uncommon for conversations about race to assume a racist framing. This link in itself is not wrong. Racial ideology is persistent and work on racism has matured beyond attitudinal studies, developing into systemic racism to better understand and explain racism and its racial ideology. However, the racialisation of people into “races” seems to remain solely within a racist perspective. That racialisation is simply the process of racialising people, allocating them into a racial hierarchy. This tends to conflate the problem of misidentification of people into descriptive racialised groups in the process of racialisation with the problem of racism as an ideology of racist organisation of society in terms of a social hierarchy. In my paper, I seek to disentangle racialisation from a racist frame, not to suggest that the two concepts of racialisation and racism are completely unrelated and separate but to provide a more nuanced understanding of racialisation so to enrich discourses on race, racialisation, and racism as well as to illustrate their interaction and connection. Singapore as a postcolonial society that embraced multiculturalism since independence provides a useful case for this analysis.

Reference

Loh, S. H. (2025). Systemic racialisation: Singaporean multiculturalism and its discontents. Ethnicities. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968251330118