Bureau of Race Neutrality

Can you imagine a society without race? Would our lives be better or worse?

Race is widely understood to be a social construct that sorts populations. Often this is according to visible physical differences (phenotypes) such as skin colour, geographic places of origin and cultural differences such as language. Cultural theorist Paul Gilroy (2000), historian Barbara J. Shields alongside her sister, sociologist Karen Fields (2012) are among those who have sought to dismantle the category of race. They dismiss arguments premised on “scientific racism”; that is that certain hereditary characteristics predispose particular groups of people to certain attributes, such as intellegence, tolerance to pain, or their propensity to poverty and criminality. The mapping of the human genome revealed that humans are genetically 99.6–99.9% similar, prompting the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2023) to advise the scientific community to avoid racial categories when studying hereditary traits. Nevertheless such calls to dispense with race are often met with resistance, arguably because communities, states and societies are deeply invested in it. Race is often conflated with ethnicity which refers to cultural practices, language and ancestry, so the Bureau is concerned with examinig these terms and their use. Prejudices based on race are often entwined with class thus the Bureau’s interests encompass issues of labour, gender, migration and borders.

The Bureau of Race Neutrality seeks to deconstruct and dismantle race as a category of difference. It was initiated by Sumugan Sivanesan during a three month long residency at Singapore Art Museum, 1 April –29 June 2024.