JULY 16 — In the aftermath of the Low Yat fracas, there has been many ‘enlightened’ individuals who are calling for moral restraint and the need for self-disciplining to eradicate racism in our society. This position is flawed as it overlooks the structural origins of racism deeply rooted in our society. Racism is not simply manifested in our society because people are ‘immature’, immoral’, ‘uneducated’ or ‘trouble-making’. Racism is a product of our systemic flaws, and making the Low Yat incident a moral issue is sidestepping the urgent need for reforms. In doing so, we are almost guaranteeing the return of violence in the future.
Understand why racial relations are so tense requires understanding the concept of ‘cultural justice’ and ‘material equality’. The need for economic equality is well understood. A deeply unequal society is unstable for democracy. In the context of Malaysia, restoring cultural justice was deemed necessary because of the humiliation suffered by the natives under the colonial government. Designating the Malay language, a national language, giving traditional Malay customs an official recognition are examples of giving recognition to the status of Malays. Both must be viewed as equally important tasks by a postcolonial government to remedy racial tensions and to rebuild a nation.
As Charles Taylor has noted, “non-recognition or misrecognition...can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, reduced mode of being. Beyond simple recognition, it can inflict a grievous wound, saddling people with crippling self-hatred”. Given the importance of a Man’s self-worth and dignity, social or cultural injustice might supplant material inequality as the more important problem. A Man’s identity is after all more personal than his material worth.
Despite a long period of more than five decades to remedy the problematic social and economic inequality in society, our government has yet to produce credible results. The problem, as I see it, is that an over-compensation of humiliation suffered by the Malays has overflowed to become cultural domination of other races by the Malays. Moreover, riling up the issue of social injustice of the Malays have often been used to disguise the poverty of ideas in dealing with deeply embedded income inequality problem.
Revealing the problems of our present regime requires attacking its formative policy: the New Economic Policy (NEP). Rather than solving the problem of economic inequality, I see the set of policies as merely trying to restore the cultural dignity of the Malays. This was deemed important because the divisive rule of our colonial masters has resulted in a belief that the Malay population will never be as successful as Chinese entrepreneurs due to ‘lazy’ cultural traits endemic to their civilisation. This message, preached so frequently by prominent Malay leaders and fed to children by parents, and schoolkids by their teachers has resulted in a historic low in Malay psyche and self-worth.
The New Economic Policy is designed to construct a class of Malay elites on par with the Chinese entrepreneurs and business class. This is an important task, because by cultivating a group of successful Malay entrepreneurs, can we finally proclaim that the ‘Malays have made it’. Rather than collectively raising the Malay population out of poverty, the NEP and its misguided focus on equity ownership policies are designed to benefit selective individuals. It is in this sense the the NEP is not an economic policy, it is a cultural one. Only by demonstrating the possibility that Malays have the potential be successful entrepreneurs can we raise the cultural profile of the Malay race. Of course, it cannot be denied that the NEP has a economic dimension, but the contention is that the cultural purpose supersedes the economic ones.
This is not only a problem confined to the sphere of public policy. In other areas, conspicuously the urban form of Kuala Lumpur, a sense of ‘Malay dominance’ has to be introduced. Any traits of Chinese-ness in road-naming is Malaynised. The architecture of Maybank, the twin towers and Putrajaya has to obey a strict code of ‘Malay style’. To be so focused on the ‘Malay-ness’ is a distraction, a sidestep from the true reforms to our system. Perhaps this language of architecture would return some form of cultural justice to Malays, allow them to finally feel like owners of their land, but is this more important than economic justice?
To truly move on from this quandary of endless racial violence, we have to be completely clear that what the government has done for the Malays since independence has only dealt superficially with the cultural dignity of the Malay race. To truly emerge from this, we have to focus on the economic problems of inter- and intra-ethnic inequality. To be so ingrained in the rhetoric of ‘humiliation’ or ‘cultural injustice’ is a distraction from the more urgent and important reforms of economic nature.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.
