Editorial: Cerise Lim Jabos America Reflects on How America Taught Her How to Think & Gave Her a Voice

Cerise Lim Jacobs grew up in colonial Singapore and then under the “benign” autocrat and strongman Lee Kuan Yew. Her passport was revoked when her family emigrated to Australia, punishment for an act deemed “unpatriotic.” She was a trial partner at Goodwin Procter (one of the 20-plus law firms being investigated for its DEI-related employment practices.

) After she retired, she founded White Snake Projects, An Activist Opera Company. The views expressed here are her own.When my family emigrated from Singapore, my passport was revoked, our choice to leave deemed “unpatriotic.



” Eventually, I made my way to the United States, which became my new home. The day I became a U.S.

citizen – an honor of a lifetime – was the day I started trying to give back to the country that had given me so much. My first step was to give up a six-figure salary at a prestigious law firm and instead, serve my new country as a federal prosecutor.America taught me how to think.

In Singapore, the school curriculum was designed to indoctrinate every child into the approved worldview, a worldview we all absorbed unquestioningly. In America, I learned a worldview based on democracy instead of the arbitrary will of an autocrat. I learned about the First Amendment; that I had constitutional rights, and how to exercise them.

America gave me a law degree, and the Supreme Court gave me the right to practice my profession. I learned to stand up for the rights of others as well as myself. America gave me my voice, a voice I never before knew I had.

And now, the administration is trying to take it away.In the most recent phase of my life, America gave me the opportunity to make a career change from law partner to art maker and founder of an activist opera company called White Snake Projects. I chose to use that platform to give back to my country through its people, those who make the United States the creative and vital melting pot it has been from the very beginning.

White Snake Projects aims to make art that represents that whole diversity of voices, but that “D” word and that mission put us in the crosshairs of our present government, which castigates us with phrases like “illegal and immoral DEI.” My journey of citizenship could never have happened in the country the current administration is trying to make.The administration’s favorite weapon is the money club.

And it’s a brutal club: submit or else your funding, your lifeline, will be terminated. The rest of their playbook is equally familiar: silence dissent; use words to mean their opposites; devalue facts; erase all history of empowerment but your own. This was all astonishingly easy to achieve in just a few short months.

For me, the reactions have been both revealing and disturbing. I understand: many businesses and institutions are seeing existential threats to the work of a lifetime. The law firm where I practiced for over twenty years is under attack for potential Equal Employment Opportunity Commission violations in its hiring and promotion practices.

The opera industry, which in recent years has made great strides in exploring works outside the canon, is tending to retreat into the safe non-topical past once again. Arts institutions are “sanitizing” their mission statements in an attempt to deflect their new overseers, abandoning supposedly cherished principles overnight. But I have to wonder if some are capitulating so easily because they have never had to live under an autocratic regime and therefore fail to understand the true nature of brainwashing.

In this kind of world, there is no safety. The sword of Damocles hangs over every head, collaborator and dissenter alike.The administration’s strategy is going to have repercussions for many generations to come, and that’s the intention.

It is targeting the very things that open the future to new possibilities: culture, art, education, equal rights, democracy, free speech, and yes, free thought. It is targeting our children and their children by censoring curriculum and discouraging questioning, all to capture the minds of our future leaders. Just ask yourselves: Why would the leader of the most powerful country in the world, in his first thirty days, focus on changing the intellectual and cultural landscape of America? Aren’t the economy, wars, foreign policy, nuclear threats, etc.

more important?Despite a childhood of indoctrination, I was one of the lucky ones who managed to find my voice. The attacks we are seeing now are designed to raise a new generation ignorant of our country’s genocidal founding, our history of slavery, our right to free speech, and our passion to uplift the downtrodden. It is a subtle, insidious process, one that is almost impossible for a victim to perceive, rather like a frog sitting in a pot of water over an open flame, oblivious to its own destruction.

Only empowered by the knowledge of our history can we hope to atone for our failures and improve on our successes. Will our children be self-aware enough to ask questions about what words actually mean? Will they hear phrases like “improper ideology” with passive acceptance?White Snake Projects faces an existential threat, but we have no intention of succumbing; not now, not ever. What we believe in is the essence of who we are and what we aspire to.

In times like these, the role of artists and intellectuals becomes critical. We dream of possibilities, envision better worlds, and empower the generations that come after us by encouraging them to do the same.The post Editorial: Cerise Lim Jabos America Reflects on How America Taught Her How to Think & Gave Her a Voice appeared first on OperaWire.

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