“I believe that all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.”
—adrienne maree brown
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

As a contributing author to the anthology We Are Not The Enemy: The Practice of Advocacy in Singapore, edited by Constance Singham and Margaret Thomas—Connie and Margie—I was invited to a celebratory dinner party at Connie’s house. The publishers, academics, environmentalists, a lawyer, a social worker, an ex-politician, an abolitionist, and a queer rights activist showed up to eat mutton samosas and chicken dum biryani.

The conversations that night left me thinking a lot about solidarity in Singapore, specifically in Singapore’s civil society. Solidarity is hard here. We are told, often and in multiple ways, that the individual, the discrete, is more important than the whole, than the inter and the intra. Meritocracy, a pillar of the Singapore identity, teaches us that only the smartest and hardest working can succeed. As Mysara Aljaru and I have previously argued in Brown is Redacted, the anthology we co-edited alongside Myle Yan Tay, there are “certain narratives, structures and policies that are actively reproduced to maintain a specific idea of a ‘multiracial society’: a society where tolerance and conscientious management are prioritised over inclusion, and where decision-making is based on majoritarianism, instead of true equity.” Some social issues are framed as more “bread-and-butter” than others, hierarchising injustices and pitting them against each other. We constantly drink the Kool-Aid of individualism: so long as we all keep to ourselves, we can all lead generally satisfactory lives. As a result, solidarity, a concept premised upon mutuality, is not intuitive to the general Singaporean, activists included. This limits our ability to push for systemic change. And it also limits our ability to forge community.

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