Confronting the bigot in us

MAY 22 ― Now that some of the dust has settled after the elections, and while our politicians duke it out over electoral fraud, we Malaysians have to contend with living life as we know it.

Reading the home minister’s remarks about how unhappy Malaysians should just emigrate was not pleasant, especially so early in the morning. But it was also inspiring and moving to see how Malaysians rallied around that and Utusan Malaysia’s eye-opening headlines.

The truth is, in spite of everyone banding together and telling one another that we are Malaysians first, we Malaysians are bigots. We are situational bigots when we see fit, and we ask for tolerance because we do not want to be inconvenienced.

I belong to a number of WhatsApp chat groups, and also groups on Facebook. The reason why I’m glued to social media and the phone is not just to try beating my friends at Scrabble (I am pathetic), but to observe human behaviour.

When the Utusan headline stunned the nation, at work, very unpleasant incidents happened. I noticed in one WhatsApp group that a Chinese friend of a member was harassed at work, on the very day that headline was published, by her Malay colleagues.  Soon, a barrage of messages appeared. Everyone was distressed.

“Teruk lah this thing to happen. How to work like this? Such inconvenience.”

I zeroed in on the word “inconvenience.” I am being myopic here but let’s look at a few hypotheses:

• Was it an inconvenience because racial tension at work would lessen productivity?

• Was the person who said this a bigot, or inherently a bigot, who just wanted to get his work done, and played nice, just so his KPIs are met?

• Or was the person truly sympathetic towards the victim?

I find all this schizophrenic. One moment, many Malaysians spew hatred about one another, and this coming from educated, middle- to upper-middle class professionals. The next moment, when a crisis like this happens, we are united.

A friend sent me a photo taken at a primary school a few days after that. Area: upper-middle class suburbia.

When I first saw the photo, I hoped that my presbyopia had worsened.

Do schools these days have such a roster? Or is this school the only one to exercise such a racial attendance registration? Am I looking too deeply into this?

How do we begin erasing racism from the country’s DNA? A concerted effort on the part of parents, schools, community leaders is one, but can they sustain it? Can we abolish race-based policies immediately, to place merit-based ones with immediate effect? And being human, would it be that easy to rid of the bigot in one’s self?

All these questions, and no clear cut answers.

***********

In a closed Facebook group, a member (members of the group have permitted their comments to be replicated in this column) had shared a New York Times article,  “Anwar, Malaysia’s Opposition Leader, Takes to the Streets”, and quoted from the feature, “Like Indonesia, Myanmar and many other countries in Asia, Malaysia is a product of European colonialism and still a work in progress. The mix of ethnic Malay, Chinese and Indians (a much smaller group) is far from a melting pot — more a Babel of language, a hodgepodge of foods and a tense coexistence of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.”

The member asked, was this a fair representation of Malaysia?

One replied, “True. Malaysians don’t integrate. They mostly have an uneasy co-existence living in their own community silos like those water bird communities. Some have long beaks, some have beaks pointed downward, some have short pointed beaks. They live in the same place but each eat different things so they don’t get into each others’ feathers. But they hardly interact with each other.”

Another responded that “It’s more a sort of parallel coexistence which tenses up at points where interests conflict, and we have no productive frame of discourse to talk through our disagreements, or even to frame discussions not as fights, but as opportunities to hash out issues. Although actually, I think food is one of the areas for which we are a melting pot. The fact that we have no appreciation of our own history (cf. Farish Noor) doesn’t help.”

“A small point though, the paths through which Malaysia and Indonesia have attempted to build any sort of ‘national identity’ have obviously differed: Indonesia decided that an Indonesian identity = Javanese and on the surface this is what defines the national identity. This is also the case in Thailand. Malaysia chose to go the different route of negotiating a sort of plural existence, but if from the outset, your colonisers have determined that the only sorts of political parties that would have legitimacy would be race-based ones (therefore perpetuating their divide-and-rule social policies and ensuring that their interests would be safeguarded) what we did was sacrifice pluralism for a confused ‘multiethnic society’.”

And another observed that a Malaysian’s identity is very much rooted in race and ethnic consciousness, thanks perhaps to the way privileges and power are still distributed along racial lines. “Attempts to understand each other tend to be superficial, and limited to social or festive gatherings. Pluralism isn’t a bad thing but I guess we haven’t managed it in the best way possible. If anyone has watched Alfian Sa’at’s play Parah, it highlights how easily apparently deep multiracial friendships can fall apart in a conflict.”

There is hope after all. The “urban chauvinism versus rural debate versus middle class needs” conversation has started, and this is something one hopes will materialise into something bigger: perhaps an understanding of how race and class are created as tools of power and dominance, and how civil society can take their power back.

Personally, I am hoping for the real histories of Malaysians to be revealed more and more, however uncomfortable they may be.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist