“I’m Not Racist, You’re Just Poor”: Class as the Singaporean Language of Race
Updated: Oct 6
Modern Singapore was constructed around two promises that were intended, at least in principle, to prevent the circumstances of birth from determining an individual's place in society. The first was multiracialism. Emerging from a region in which communal politics had repeatedly produced political conflict, and from its own experience of serious racial violence in the 1960s, the newly independent state rejected the proposition that Singapore belonged principally to its Chinese majority and instead defined Chinese, Malays, Indians and other communities as constituent parts of a common nation. The second promise was meritocracy: access to education, employment and social advancement was to depend not upon inherited status or communal privilege but upon demonstrable ability and achievement. These principles became more than political slogans. Race was incorporated into the administrative architecture of the state through the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others classification, while policies ranging from ethnic quotas in public housing to minority representation in Parliament attempted to prevent communal divisions from hardening into permanent social boundaries. Meritocracy, meanwhile, became central to Singapore's education system, civil service and broader account of how economic advancement ought to occur.
The apparent success of this settlement makes the persistence of ethnic socioeconomic disparities more difficult, rather than easier, to interpret. Singapore's 2020 Census recorded a median monthly household income from work of S$7,972 among Chinese households and S$8,500 among Indian households, compared with S$5,704 among Malay households; calculated per household member, the respective figures were S$2,603, S$2,521 and S$1,594. Educational and occupational distributions likewise remain uneven across ethnic groups, although the size of these differences has changed considerably over time. None of this demonstrates that Singapore's meritocratic settlement has failed, still less that racial discrimination straightforwardly explains the disparities: aggregate differences can emerge from household composition, educational attainment, accumulated wealth, occupational distribution and a host of historical processes without any employer, teacher or institution making an explicitly racial decision. Nevertheless, the coexistence of a strong institutional commitment to racial equality with persistent ethnic differences in socioeconomic outcomes creates a question that cannot be resolved merely by observing that Singapore is formally meritocratic.
It is here that class becomes important. Consider two explanations for the same inequality. One might argue that a Malay Singaporean encounters disadvantage because he is Malay; another might argue that the relevant disadvantages arise because he attended a weaker school, possesses fewer educational credentials, grew up in a lower-income household or occupies a less prestigious profession. The first explanation is recognisably racial; the second appears socioeconomic and, importantly, is entirely compatible with meritocratic principles. Yet the distinction becomes considerably less secure if educational attainment, family income and occupational status are themselves distributed unevenly between ethnic groups. What appears at the point of decision as a class difference may contain the consequences of processes that occurred much earlier, while an outcome that is racially unequal need not have been produced by an explicitly racial decision.
This is the problem exemplified within the deliberately crude assertion that 'I'm not racist, you're just poor.' It assumes that race and class provide competing explanations: if unequal treatment can be attributed to education, income, occupation or neighbourhood, then race has apparently been eliminated from the causal account. In Singapore, however, that inference is particularly difficult to sustain because race and socioeconomic status are neither identical nor independent. Their relationship is instead recursive. Ethnic inequalities can affect the distribution of socioeconomic resources; those resources subsequently influence educational and occupational outcomes through mechanisms that may be formally race-neutral; the resulting socioeconomic differences can then acquire the legitimacy of meritocratic outcomes and, in turn, reinforce perceptions of ethnic groups themselves.
The argument of this article is not that the claim that classism in Singapore is merely racism expressed in more socially acceptable language. Such a claim would collapse two analytically distinct forms of inequality and, more importantly, would make it impossible to distinguish genuine socioeconomic mechanisms from racial discrimination. Rather, class provides Singapore with a socially legitimate explanatory vocabulary through which racially patterned inequalities can be understood, reproduced and, in some circumstances, explained away without requiring explicitly racial beliefs or decisions. This matters precisely because explanations based upon qualifications, occupation, income and educational attainment are often factually correct. The problem arises when those explanations are treated as the beginning of the causal story rather than as variables that themselves require explanation.
The distinction can be seen most clearly in employment, where it is possible to isolate race from conventional indicators of merit. In an experimental study, Peter Chew and his co-authors presented Chinese Singaporean participants with fictitious job applicants whose apparent racial identities and academic qualifications were independently varied. Malay applicants were evaluated less favourably than comparable Chinese applicants, while White applicants received more favourable assessments, including differences in perceived competence, suitability and recommended remuneration. The importance of the experiment lies less in demonstrating that racial prejudice exists—an unsurprising finding in almost any multiracial society—than in showing that socioeconomic explanations have limits. Where qualifications are held constant and evaluations nevertheless diverge, class cannot account for the entire difference; race retains an independent effect upon how ostensibly objective merit is perceived.
The inverse problem emerges when qualifications are not held constant. Singapore's education system distributes students across institutions and pathways according substantially to measured academic performance, making educational credentials an apparently defensible basis for later selection. Yet academic achievement does not arise independently of socioeconomic circumstances. Research on Singaporean education has documented significant differences between elite and mainstream educational environments, while work on meritocracy has questioned the extent to which advantages accumulated through family resources can subsequently appear as individual achievement. Leonel Lim (2016)'s comparison of elite and mainstream schools, for example, argues that even the cultivation of supposedly general capacities such as critical thinking differs systematically between institutional settings, with elite schooling helping to reproduce particular forms of cultural and intellectual advantage. If socioeconomic resources influence educational achievement, and socioeconomic resources are distributed unevenly across ethnic groups, then selection by educational achievement can reproduce an ethnically uneven outcome even in the absence of discrimination at the final point of selection.
The significance of meritocracy therefore lies not merely in the opportunities it distributes but in the explanations it makes available. Once an individual possesses weaker qualifications, the employer who rejects that individual can accurately say that the decision concerned qualifications rather than race; once a household cannot afford a particular neighbourhood, the resulting residential difference can accurately be described as economic rather than racial. Both statements may be true at the immediate point at which the outcome occurs. What they cannot establish is that race played no role in the sequence of processes through which the relevant socioeconomic difference was produced. Class can therefore function as a mechanism of causal displacement: the further inequality travels through education, employment and wealth accumulation, the easier it becomes to locate its explanation in the socioeconomic characteristic immediately preceding the outcome rather than in the processes that shaped that characteristic.
The controversy surrounding a proposed foreign-worker dormitory in Serangoon Gardens in 2008 demonstrates what this entanglement looks like outside the relatively clean environment of an experiment. More than 1,400 residents of the affluent estate signed a petition opposing plans to house migrant workers in a former school, raising concerns about security, congestion, property values and the consequences of workers congregating near residential areas. The dormitory ultimately proceeded with modifications, including relocating its entrance, while its anticipated composition shifted towards Malaysian and Chinese workers in manufacturing and service occupations rather than the predominantly South Asian construction-worker population initially associated with the proposal. Subsequent scholarship has therefore resisted reducing the controversy to a single axis of prejudice, since the socially constructed category of the “foreign worker” combined nationality, occupation, income, gender and race.
That combination is precisely what makes the case more revealing than an uncomplicated instance of racial hostility. A resident concerned about property values need not secretly harbour racial animus for the objection to acquire a racial dimension, because the low-wage migrant labour force to which the objection refers is itself organised along racial and national lines. Conversely, describing opposition to South Asian workers entirely as racism risks ignoring the significance of class: an Indian banker living in the same neighbourhood does not occupy the same social category as a Bangladeshi construction worker, despite both being South Asian. The distinction demonstrates why neither race nor class can simply absorb the other. Race affects the meanings attached to socioeconomic categories, while socioeconomic position determines which members of a racial group are most exposed to those meanings.
A similar distinction appears in Singapore's rental market, although here the evidence allows race to be isolated more directly. In the 2021 CNA–Institute of Policy Studies survey, approximately 90 per cent of respondents indicated willingness to rent a spare room to a Singaporean Chinese tenant, compared with 51 per cent for a Singaporean Malay and 45 per cent for a Singaporean Indian tenant. Among Chinese respondents, willingness to rent to a new citizen originating from China was higher than willingness to rent to either Singaporean Malays or Singaporean Indians. Unlike aggregate income differences, these preferences cannot readily be reduced to socioeconomic inequality because the hypothetical comparison holds Singaporean citizenship constant and asks respondents directly about tenants distinguished by ethnicity. The case therefore establishes an important boundary to the class argument: not all racial inequality in Singapore is mediated through class, and any analysis that treats class as the universal explanation would simply reproduce, at an academic level, the very tendency to explain race away that requires examination.
The relationship between race and class in Singapore is consequently best understood as layering. Direct racial discrimination persists in some settings; inherited and contemporary socioeconomic inequalities operate in others; and, in many cases, the two processes interact across time, so that an inequality initially shaped by one mechanism becomes reproduced through another. A racial disadvantage affecting access to an opportunity can produce an economic disadvantage; that economic disadvantage can affect educational attainment; educational attainment can subsequently determine employment through a formally neutral selection process; and the resulting occupational disparity can then appear as evidence of differential merit. By the end of this sequence, no discriminatory decision need be visible at the point at which inequality is observed, even though the distribution of outcomes remains racially patterned.
This is why the question of whether class provides a socially acceptable “language of race” must be answered carefully. Class does not merely provide polite terminology with which Singaporeans can express prejudices they privately understand in racial terms. More importantly, it provides a causal grammar through which inequality can be interpreted: people succeed because they possess qualifications, earn more because they occupy more productive professions, live in particular neighbourhoods because they can afford them, and occupy different positions because a meritocratic system has sorted them according to achievement. Each proposition may be individually defensible, yet their accumulation can produce an account in which racial inequality is acknowledged statistically while race progressively disappears from its explanation.
The relevant question is why poverty, educational attainment, occupational position and other markers of class are distributed as they are, which mechanisms generated those distributions, and whether race continues to influence the processes through which they are reproduced. Singapore's commitment to meritocracy has made explicitly racial hierarchy difficult to justify; it has not thereby guaranteed that the socioeconomic categories through which individuals are subsequently sorted are historically or socially independent of race. Class becomes the Singaporean language of race, then, not when Singaporeans secretly mean “race” whenever they say “class”, but when class becomes the point at which explanation stops precisely where an adequate account of racial inequality ought to begin.
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