If you haven’t watched CNA Insider’s video about race, you should watch that first before watching the parody video by Singapore’s online personality Preetipls.

CNA Insider basically did a social experiment to encourage a young Singaporean Indian to integrate with a Chinese family with two young kids.

Divya, the house guest, doesn’t mix with people from other races because of unpleasant childhood experiences. She was teased by Chinese friends for “not bathing” and being “dark, black”.

The two kids from the Ang family, as young as 9 and 6 years old, admitted that they don’t like Indians a lot and find them “scary”.

The CNA production crew probably thought it was a brilliant idea to bring them together to spark honest conversations about race.

Some netizens felt that it reflected the state of multi-racialism in Singapore while many others found it really disturbing and unnecessary.

They had so much to say about this video that it garnered 1,200 comments and more than 5,000 shares.

Comments from two sides of the camp

Many could not accept the level of ignorance and believed that it’s the parents’ responsibility to educate their children or expose them to other races:

However, some felt that the honesty was necessary as racism still exists in Singapore.

Multiracialism is WIP 

Perhaps for many of us who grew up with friends of other races, we may think that the CNA documentary does not do justice to the years of hard work we have put in to achieve multi racialism in Singapore.

We believe that we have progressed for the past 50 years but this video seems to suggest that we have regressed instead.

But we should not forget that multiracialism is a piece of art that is constantly work-in-progress.

According to The Red Dot producer Poh Kok Ing, for some of us, “our interactions with people of other races is merely transactional, like a Chinese buying food from a Malay stall, or colleagues working together”.

Like it or not, many still stick to their own race and converse in their own language with or without consciously realising that they are doing so.

So when we talk about inclusiveness at a deeper level, it starts from small things like being mindful of the language which we speak in when our friends of other races are partaking in the conversation.

If you’d like to contribute your story to us, drop us an email at editors@sureboh.sg and we’ll review it. We read each submission that comes to us within two weeks of receiving it.