WORKING HARD(ER) IN SCHOOL: THE RACE FOR STATUS AND EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Although the Singapore Malay community has progressed significantly over the years, the gaps between racial groups remain stark. Material differences between racial groups reveal an important aspect of racial stratification, but they obscure a much larger sphere of social stratification based on status and cultural representations. I wish to draw upon what Lamont (2018) calls “recognition gaps” – defined as disparities in social worth and cultural membership between groups in society. These gaps are driven by the independent role of cultural production and status beliefs as sources of racial inequality that are associated with material differences, but, at the same time, not synonymous with them. Herewith is an exploratory study to understand how Chinese and Malay university students navigate and negotiate the field of education as a site of cultural production and status beliefs, to explain why it is that Malay students will often have to “work harder” than their Chinese counterparts, although they may be equally accomplished. This qualitative study entails an approach of “holding class constant” (to use the quantitative parlance) – by constraining interviews to only university students from lower-income backgrounds, but varying race – by interviewing students from the Chinese and Malay communities, to see if the status attributes of race might alone explain patterns of inequality.