Many of us have known today’s famous vlogger and influencer Nas Daily from his short one-minute videos and the signature send-off tagline, “That’s one minute, see you tomorrow!” Nas Daily is Nuseir Yassi, a 26-year-old Palestinian-Israeli who decided to travel the world and make one video every day not only to document his journey, but also expose his viewers to new experiences around the world. In one of Yassi’s more outstanding videos, he opens with,

“I hope this video make you angry, because it makes me angry”

This episode of Nas Daily is titled “Segregation”. When we hear the word segregation, we would think about the separation of people on the basis of race, skin color, sex, religion, and other differences, leading to inequality, discrimination and intolerance. Even as societies have advanced and connected without borders, and people’s views are more open; racial discrimination still often manifests itself in schools, societies, and communities, on and offline. What follows is nevertheless conflict.

At the beginning of his video, Nuseir Yassin talks about his childhood as an Arab who didn’t have any Jewish friends. It wasn’t because he hated Jews, but because Jews and Arabs didn’t want to live around each other. In Israel where Yassin lived, segregation exists much like in many more countries around the world. There, Jews and Arabs would live in different neighborhoods. They wouldn’t go to the same school or associate with each other in any way.

He adds that this racial segregation is no one’s fault. It’s only natural for humans to gravitate towards those with the same culture. But self-segregation from the rest of society on the basis of faith or race, he notes, is dangerous. For instance, although London has rich racial diversity; Muslims, black people and white people live separately. The Muslims have their own neighborhood and they’re surrounded by their own culture. Society is, then, broken up into parts that don’t mix with one another. And when they don’t see or understand the others, it becomes easier to hate. This is why segregation is frightening.

However, there’s a solution. Yassin shares about Singapore, a country with a diverse population of Malays, Chinese and Indians. 81% of the people live in public housing which is required by the government to fulfill a racial quota: in every 100 apartments, there are 74 Chinese families, 13 Indian households and 13 Malaysian ones. No one race occupies 100% of public housing, and this creates a good model for racial integration. Jun Xiang, a representative from Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB) who is featured in the video also added,

“We have encouraged social mixing so that people of different racial groups stay together and understand the lifestyle of each other,”

This kind of social mixing enables people of different races to meet and mingle: children play together in the playground and become friends as their parents say hello to each other in the elevator. If this integration policy worked in Singapore, it can be adopted by any country in the world. Because no matter where they are, governments should find a way to encourage people of different races to live together. Not only in the policy level that should be changed, but we should also teach our children and the next generations to understand cultural diversity, and accept and respect others’ differences so that we can live harmoniously as one big society and there can be no place left for segregation.