In the wake of the ‘brownface’ incident and subsequent Preetipls controversy, a friend of mine approached me with an older Preetipls video, ‘PREETIPLS WISHES U A GONG XI FA CAI!’ – one in which she quite literally prances around in a cheongsam, employs Chinese stereotype after Chinese stereotype, and pokes fun at Chinese poetry and songs. Intrigued, I decided to search for it on YouTube and watched it myself. I found it funny and entertaining and, judging by the comments made before the ‘brownface’ period, I was not the only Chinese person who thought that way either. It made me wonder: Was her ‘K. Muthusamy’ video racist? Why didn’t I find her video offensive? Why did the comments section for the same video see a distinct turn, from amused and supportive reactions when it first came out, to outraged and disgusted ones over a year later? And perhaps most importantly, what now?

I was lucky enough to have seen the original ‘K. Muthusamy’ video prior to the advisories against its distribution. I say ‘lucky’, because it meant that I did not have to rely on secondary sources to tell me if the video was offensive or not – it did not strike me as offensive nor racist. She had mentioned in several parts of the video disclaimers that the video did not refer to all Chinese people, and contrary to some accounts of the video using vulgarities to attack Chinese people, it actually used the common, arguably even popular colloquial phrase ‘to f*** something up’, which has a closer meaning to ‘to mess something up’ than to any explicit curse. It was only when explaining this to my friend that he confessed: he had not seen the actua ideo and, going by second-hand accounts, had bought into the story of the video being explicitly against the Chinese. It occurred to me that attempts to limit the damage caused by the video by taking it down had the unintended consequence of obscuring the issue even further, with no proper recourse for clearing up the misconceptions as the primary material had been removed from the public sphere.

Bungled salvage operations aside, the contention around the language especially caught my interest – the expression in question was one used regularly by my friends and I throughout our early teens and into our now young adulthood. We used it at one another, sometimes in the context of schoolwork, sometimes in the context of a shared project, sometimes even with regard to personal endeavours, yet the language never caused such friction between us – so why the big deal now?

I believe it to be an issue of miscommunicated audiences and contexts. Even my friends, aware as we are that the expression itself is not used as a vulgarity, would be mindful not to use it in a formal setting, for example an audience with a professor or with senior family members around.

Left unsaid in this mindfulness is something that we all do, consciously or not – we alter our speech patterns to suit our given audiences and contexts. I see this happen with my father and his friends, even my uncles – after a normal conversation with me, a phone call from his friend arrives and he switches into another ‘language’ – Hokkien laced with vulgarities to greet his friend. And so too does his friend, who will respond with more Hokkien vulgarities. It is a convention between them.

Yet, once when my father overheard a song that had the infamous English four-letter word in its lyrics, he expressed concern about why I was listening to such obscene songs. The word alone does not make an offensive vulgarity – the context and audience are important factors as well. Among Preetipls’ largely young audience, and within the context of her relatively consistent comedy style, the term should not have been taken as an offensive attack.

So why did it trigger a defensive uproar of such scale? In my opinion, it was a combination of the change in context and audience, as well as the break in her very style of comedy with this video. With the video being released in lieu of and directly referencing the racist E-Pay advertisement, it positioned itself as a reaction video.

Given the trending status that the advertisement had already begun receiving prior to the video, this propelled it beyond an audience that understands her style, leading to a knee-jerk reaction that a little too quickly pounced on the word, without any context – neither her existing comedy style nor language conventions among young people. Without these contexts, it became all too easy to perceive it as an obscene attack on the entirety of the Chinese population in Singapore.

However, it is not my intention to simply justify her video unreservedly. Watching some of her other videos, both before and after the saga, I noticed that the ‘K. Muthusamy’ video stood out in contrast to her other works. Going back to the Chinese New Year video, and even her latest video after the ‘brownface’ saga ‘PREETIPLS CELEBRATES NATIONAL DAY 2019! (My Singaporean Alphabet)’, her videos often employ stereotypes and coarse language, along with a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek tone that I, as an ethnic Chinese Singaporean, genuinely find funny and entertaining.

‘K. Muthusamy’, on the other hand, had an understandably angry and reactionary tone to it. While not finding it offensive, neither did I think it sought to entertain. Acknowledging the exasperation that she undeniably felt as an ethnic minority in Singapore facing systemic racism yet again, her elevated public platform comes with a certain level of scrutiny and awareness that she possibly miscalculated in releasing ‘K. Muthusamy’ when she did.

Self-directed as the modern day social media influencer is, and without guidelines or superiors to help pre-empt potential backlash, it is still important that they realise they tread a space that not only caters to their intended audience but can, for better or worse, also be accessed by people who may not properly understand what they intend to do. In the case of ‘K. Muthusamy’, I can only wonder if, had she released the video after the ‘brownface’ furore had eased or filmed the video after recalibrating her anger and frustration, things would have turned out differently?

While the main consequences of the ‘brownface’ saga centred unfairly, I think, around Preetipls, the realm of social media does not involve only producers generating content. More so than ever, people actively engage with content on social media in real time. As much as I think social media influencers need to learn how to occupy the public sphere in a way that doesn’t draw unwanted attention a la ‘K. Muthusamy’, so too must the interlocutors of social media do so responsibly.

As we enter this new age of social media and hyperconnectivity, we must define for ourselves the proper terms of engagement in cyberspace. It might have been possible, even easy, to segment off a physical space or venue for a specific audience to enjoy a specific form of entertainment, but with open access platforms like YouTube, would such methods achieve equally desirable outcomes? Should we ban outright and sanction what we don’t like? Would that even work given the extremely porous nature of the internet? I think we, as with many other societies around the world, have not conclusively come up with solutions to these issues. However, one thing is for certain – we must talk about it constructively. Anger is natural, but how should we deal with it now that we have this unprecedentedly powerful tool at our disposal?

A recent and related trend I have noticed on my own social media is that of netizens using it to air their grievances and thoughts on social issues, sometimes with unconstructively directed anger. With ‘blackface’ it was racism, with Pink Dot it was LGBT rights, with the Monica Baey saga it was sexual assault, and with ‘This is what Inequality Looks Like’ it was inequality.

More will come as we grow as a society, and I, for one, welcome the increased attention and engagement these legitimate issues are getting, facilitated by social media. However, this calls to mind the American ‘politics of outrage’, described by numerous articles and essays in the past decade as the heavily emotive and heavily polarising rhetoric that dominates the public sphere, often making nuanced or civil discourse difficult if not outright impossible.

While we surely have not fallen into a situation as bad as the American public sphere to warrant a full decade of warning against these ‘politics of outrage’, I think it can do us no harm to reflect on whether our own online spaces can head in that trajectory – and whether that is something beneficial, both here within our shores as well as across the Pacific. Clearly, the controversies I mentioned earlier, all of which occurred very recently, indicate that we do have many deep-seated issues that we urgently need to resolve. Real lives are negatively affected in profound ways by all of these problems, and there is a dire need to collectively progress as a nation to ensure a better future for all. The issue I hope to highlight, however, is how we approach this progress.

Social media, as handy a tool for publicly berating someone who fails to understand the problem adequately, can also be an equally handy tool for educating that very same person and guiding them through relevant and understandable ideas. As the saying goes, ‘Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.’ We need not play the fool and set up our own maze of polarisations. Yes, it is difficult, frustrating, and exhausting to repeatedly attempt to cleave through bigotry, only to be met with a fresh layer of ignorance. I have personally had these encounters more times than I would like – and the genuine empathy we feel for the many stories of those downtrodden we encounter online only adds to the infuriating helplessness. But societal progress must be a collective effort, and this collective includes, like it or not, those who knowingly or unknowingly perpetuate the issue by effectively telling them to stop. ⬛

Darren Mak is an English Linguistics graduate from the National University of Singapore and volunteers at Jamiyah Youth Group. He has participated in regional and international conferences on various social issues including religion and race.