Thread by @dweenzers

So @ChannelNewsAsia recently made a documentary about the growing class divide called "Regardless of Class", which you can check out here po.st/RRxmay I found it incredibly frustrating to watch for several reasons #RegardlessofClass

It starts off with Janil saying that the old divisions of Singapore used to be race, religion and language, which is why those 3 made it into the pledge, and why as the chairman of onepeople.sg he's been facilitating discussions about them

The first part of the video is straight out of the onepeople.sg approach to discussing racism - get people who do experience oppression to distill their frustration into something tangible and visible and get people who don't to witness and empathise

So we have rando passers-by being pulled off the street to read testimonies by fast-food workers, cardboard collectors and the like. Not quite impactful enough, needs more emotion. So he organises 2 focus groups of mixed class, 1 for adults and 1 for students.

It is incredibly awkward, and even Janil says he wonders if it was a mistake to put those kids in such an awkward situation just to prove a point. I think we need to find new ways of getting people to care that do not involve oppressed people to perform their hurt.

One wonders why we are spending so much time talking about the perception of class, and how "high class" people treat "low class" people. It is as frustrating as watching racism get reduced to micro-aggressions. It's as if the only problem of low-income is getting snide remarks

We do see a couple of thoughtful interviews - Leong Chan Hoong from IPS sensibly cautions that throwing people together without ensuring that the interaction is meaningful could be a disaster.

Finally, at 39:31 of a video that is 48:37 long, we finally ask - how did poor people get to be poor. He interviews Siti Sufiyah, who shares a tale that has become familiar to me from my time interviewing long-income senior women:

1. Her second child needed specialised medical attention after he was born
2. This medical help was expensive
3. She needed to spend time going to hospital
4. This time spent made it difficult for her to keep full-time employment
5. It was difficult to access financial assistance

To conclude this interview, Janil asks her how come they have handphones and a TV. The kids save their raya money and buy the phones themselves and the TV was donated by the salvation army. Janil ponders why financial assistance hasn't helped and so visits an FSC

Cindy Ng-Tay, director of the Methodist Welfare Service (MWS) Covenant Family Service Centre at Hougang, gives a v. sensible interview about why families like Sufiyah's struggle in spite of financial aid. Key takeaways:

Causes:
1. Access to resources differs at birth and widens each year
2. Poverty creates chronic stress, which affects ability to access resources

Solutions:
"Early education and early support to children from low-income families and not tie access of resources to parents' marital status, socio-economic status, or work status"
(bless her)

Janil's conclusion of this is to say "but what about parental responsibility" and Cindy says that it wouldn't be fair to tie kids' life outcomes to their parent's level of motivation.

She concludes by saying we need to "recognize structural factors that maintain poverty and recognize that the poor have the potential to aspire and be inspired for a better life".

In a voiceover after this interview, Janil says he is not convinced that long-term govt handouts are the solution. WHY NOT? He asks people their opinion, decides it's not going to work, without saying why, and then dismisses it.

He (of course) concludes with a social enterprise and interviews @bettrbarista on the work they do to equip adult women with employable skills. I do not doubt the good work they do, but the jump from talking about early intervention to employment was very stark and bizarre

Even more bizarre is how he says the thing that troubles him most is that low-income singaporeans feel less of a sense of belonging to SG and less pride in being singaporean. How is this the most troubling?! Did we miss the part where someone talked about being homeless?

The emphasis on the bonding between people of different classes is banal and distracting. Problems will not be magically solved if we all just treat each other nicely.

I think my disillusionment with doing social research in SG stemmed from realising that the lack of change was not a lack of information but a lack of will. It was not data but ideology. That's not to say research is useless, but that it may be more useful directed at the public

I absolutely think that we need to treat each other more kindly, but I also think that it's not enough, and it is not the point. If the govt were really serious about this, they could start by hiring and promoting from more diverse academic backgrounds #RegardlessofClass