Racism in Corporate World

Racism and stereotyping against Indians in Singapore, especially from Chinese Singaporeans is something that is still very much alive, although everything looks nice and well from appearance. I am not sure why SOME of the Chinese Singaporeans took such a negative view towards Indians.

From my experience, I see a lot of racism and stereotyping against Indians happened even in my company which is so called multinational company. The kind of racism is not the negative physical action against another race but the strong opinion about other races having certain characteristics or making sarcastic remarks. Majority of the staff in my company are Indians and they usually hang among themselves, seldom socialize with the Singaporean Chinese because they think the Chinese Singaporeans are arrogant, superficial and selfish (based on the feedback I got from few Indian friends and colleagues). For example, on Monday morning, there were lots of ppl waiting for the lift. While the lift is packed with some of the Indians, the Chinese, especially the females usually would not want to go in. They rather wait for the next one even though they are running late. Once, my colleagues even commented " Oh my, we are now in Little India". The way they treated the Indians as if they are dirty and smelly. They discriminated against their skin colour , laughed at their Indian accent and also make fun of their dressing sense.

Another example is, all the staff would usually share the biscuits and tidbits located at pantry that are provided by the company. Usually, new biscuits and tidbits will be renewed monthly. By then, my Singaporean Chinese colleagues would brought their own container and flocked into the panty to store some new biscuits that has yet to be opened by someone else. I was curious and asked one of them why they were in such a hurry to store these biscuits. One of them said " Oh, we have to be fast. Otherwise, those Indians might use their hand to open these biscuits. Their hand are dirty, probably they dont even wash their hand after going to the toilet. And we might get food poisoning and they laughed sarcastically." I find these attitude and mindset are ridiculous. I have many Indian friends and also work with most of the Indians in my company. I find that they are smart, friendly, very nice people and are like anyone of us.

I think the problem is because majority of the population in Singapore are Chinese. They have never gone through such experience and they do not understand how it feels to be the minority. Although most of them are well-educated, they seems to lack of moral value and they do not have the moral authority to be racist on others. Necessary steps need to be taken by all parties to tackle racism in order to maintain racial harmony in Singapore.