KUALA LUMPUR, May 10 — A Malaysian society blind towards race cannot exist as long as there is not a unified school system for all the country’s communities, editors of Umno-owned Utusan Malaysia said today.
Using the recent controversy over a minister’s announcement — and subsequent retraction — that “race” will be deleted from some official forms, the editors of the Malay language daily took an indirect swipe at the vernacular schools that are often accused of being obstacles to racial integration.
Writing under the shared “Awang Selamat” pen name, the writer said demands for “race” to be removed from documents or the removal of Bumiputera special privileges are not enough to create a united Malaysian people — unless a unified school system is implemented.
“This reform can be achieved if all are committed to adopt a principle of citizenship that embraces local cultures and norms,” the writer wrote in the newspaper’s weekend edition.
“That is why I am excited to await when this is no longer a dream — all races sharing the same school.”
Awang Selamat earlier asserted that it was proven the world over that a single school system does not dilute or erase racial identity, and touted it as the best system to “cultivate racial understanding in a multicultural country, especially in this complex new millennium”.
On Wednesday, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Joseph Entulu Belaun was reported as announcing a Cabinet decision to omit “race” from official forms in which the classification serves no function.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak denied this the next day, as did Belaun, who also apologised after saying the matter was only discussed at Cabinet level.
But his announcement had caused uproar among many Malay groups including Perkasa, which threatened legal action over any such decision.
Defenders of Bumiputera special privileges regularly target vernacular schools to deflect claims for equal treatment of the country’s races after decades of race-based affirmative action.
Vernacular schools continue to grow in popularity here in Malaysia, with an increasing number of non-Malay parents preferring to send their children to Mandarin- and Tamil-language schools over the Malay-language national schools.
But a former minister noted that the preference may not be due solely to language or communal preferences, and instead pointed to a creeping “Arabification” of national schools to explain the apparent aversion.
“Majority of Chinese will send children to national school if it’s national and not Arabic,” Datuk Zaid Ibrahim said on Twitter last year.
Malaysia’s Bumiputera majority enjoys privileges under a system of race-based preferential treatment in jobs, housing and access to government funding.
Among others, these have been blamed for Malaysia’s chronic brain drain that has seen its non-Malay communities leaving the country, with southern neighbour Singapore the main beneficiary.
