You’re an Indian tutor? Sorry, it’s harder for you to find students.

Photo credit: British Council Singapore

Today, I read about Darius’ account about landlord’s racism in Singapore. I would like to respond as co-founder of ManyTutors, a tuition agency in Singapore, because we see this in the tuition industry as well and we think this is deplorable. It needs to stop.

Having been in the industry for more than 10 years, we can say that yes, there is racism in Singapore and many parents when requesting for tutors preclude tutors by race. Many of them do specify that they do not want Indian tutors. We have always found this appalling.

Disgraceful comments that ManyTutors have received in the past include:

1. Indians are ok, but not too black.
2. My daughter is afraid of Indians.
3. Actual request from Indian parents that baffles us the most: I don’t want an Indian tutor

As a society, we do need to be colour blind. The good news is that we do see less of these kind of requests as compared to 5 years ago. We suspect that younger parents are less racist.

How do we deal with these requests?

We try to accommodate but yet be principled at the same time by recommending more than just one tutor. For example, we will shortlist one tutor that fits the parent’s bill and another two more that do not but we think are better candidates based on merit. Many times, we find that when we do that, parents will select the tutor based on merit as well.

For example, a parent may want a female undergrad to teach maths to their daughter and they prefer non Indians. However, when we present such a choice and another candidate who is an Indian female maths major and stays next block, the parents are more likely to choose the 2nd candidate irrespective of race.

So to be fair, from the above example, it seems that although most people have an underlying prejudice which they probably cannot explain either, but when faced with a choice based on an individual’s merit, the person’s race is not as important.

The “all-races-welcome” indicator that improves the search results is a really good idea.

ManyTutors will follow 99.co’s lead to introduce an “All-Races-Welcome” indicator on our website if we determine that racism is a problem in our class listing section.