Systemic racialisation: Singaporean multiculturalism and its discontents.

This article focuses on the concept of systemic racialisation—the process by which people are socially and politically categorised into "races"—and its manifestation within Singapore's state-espoused multiculturalism. It argues that while Singapore's multiracial model, based on the Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others (CMIO) framework, aims to promote racial harmony and equal recognition, it perpetuates ethnoracialisation and encourages conflict avoidance and disempowered dialogue. These dynamics contribute to the normalization of subtle and everyday racism despite the absence of overt systemic racism at the state level. The paper highlights how systemic racialisation, distinct from systemic racism, can unintentionally sustain racial essentialism and hinder critical public discourse on race, thereby complicating efforts to address racism in multicultural societies like Singapore.