Indeed. And we would need to also continue to question and interpret documented narratives, revisit them with reasonable framing, either to refresh them in sustaining our sense of belonging and identity or sometimes in light of new conversations. After all, identity is a process.

that can encourage us to participate in building our belonging and national identity while we continue to work with new and old challenges as well as refine structural constraints and problems.

hence national identity must always take a back seat. Instead, if a situation demands for it, our national identity should take precedence even when we prioritise our racialised identity in our daily affairs. This would be an optimistic and perhaps more realistic way to understand identity ...

Instead, we should understand that identity while multifaceted is also situational - that it is fluid and context-dependent. For example, when met with heightened race consciousness, what matters is that we do not assume that our racialised identity is most important, ...

SM's appeal to Singaporeans to foster our sense of belonging through participation in society is good advice, though it may encounter plenty of challenges, such as our heightened race consciousness. But we should not think that national identity is not our most important identity as a reality. ...

My concern is that there is an emerging narrowly-defined multiracialised framing of the Singapore national identity. And that it is partly born from Singaporeans' interactions with Singaporean multiracialism that has inculcated a heightened race consciousness. ...

Raja was worried about ethno-nationalism for good reasons. The issue with a rising variant of ethno-nationalism in Singapore is described in my article "A multiracialised national identity: Singaporean multiracialism and national identity". ...

doi.org/10.1080/0725...

In Irene Ng's biography of Raja, the understanding is that Raja was concerned with the "systematic appeals to citizens to identify, organise and express themselves along ascribed ethnic [racialised] lines" that could raise race consciousness and thwart the cultivating of national identity. ...

But what I wish to point out is that although I think it is fair for SM to see Raja's idea of "forgetting" everything else as an ideal and perhaps a "tall order" indeed if taken in itself, there is also a need to contextualise Raja's stance, on top of LC's clarification. ...