COLOUR-BLINDNESS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
Towards the end of his I Have a Dream speech in 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. called for full civil and economic rights for African Americans and an end to racism in the United States (US), he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”1.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE ‘WOKE’, ANYWAY?
Before 2014, the call to ‘stay woke’ was, for many people, unheard of. Within the Black communities, however, it had been around for a while – commonly referring to the notion of staying alert to the deceptions of other people as a basic survival tactic. In 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ‘stay woke’ symbolically came to be the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets as they urged one another to ‘stay woke’ against police brutality and unjust police tactics[1].
THE INCIDENT
In a video uploaded by Twitter user Ryan Kalmani, a woman dressed in pink was heard questioning other commuters in the MRT cabin about their ethnicity and education whilst taking videos of them. When another commuter had identified herself as Malay, the woman replied with, “Malay is it? Okay, no wonder”1. Claiming that she was being harassed, she had allegedly counted the number of Malays in the cabin to report to the police.
