I've never been part of the crowd that demands that UiTM opens its admission to non-Bumiputera students.
I have never been part of that crowd because I don’t identify strongly with Western civilization. I suspect that only those who identify strongly with Western civilization believe that all of us should not be do anything to suggest that we prefer being with people like ourselves, for that would suggest we are racist.
Of course, they will have all sorts of clever justifications to claim that no, they are not demanding that we should not prefer to be with people like ourselves because they strongly identify with the west. If you ask them, they will give you all sorts of reasons, like that they just want what they want to make the world a better place, or because it is for the greater good, or for the sake of efficiency or simplicity or whatnot, but to me, they probably just want what they want because that is what the west wants, and they tend to identify with the West.
In the West, until not too long ago, a “coloured” person would have been denied entry to places where whites went because the whites were racist. The whites truly thought that they were a superior race on account of their skin colour and thus believed it was insulting to co-mingle with people of other races as equals. It is because they were truly racist for hundreds of years that when the West was finally forced to repent for its racism, they had to forcibly make both the whites and the coloured people in their midst use the same bathrooms and universities, as a way to publicly renounce their racist past.
This concept of forcible integration to prove that you have been cleansed from the sin of racism, however, is just in tune with the experience of the West. It doesn’t have any relevance to our own experience in our part of the world.
Nations in various forms have existed in this land for thousands of years, and in those thousands of years, none of the races here thought that the other races were inferior to them and all of them wanted to live separately in their own enclaves without feeling like they were doing something wrong just because they wanted to be with their own kind.
Being with your own kind is a perfectly natural feeling that all of us have. It is only in the West that people of different races have to be forced to be together, as a reaction against their racist past. In our part of the world, where people of different races have never been forced to be apart, there is absolutely no reason why we should force all of us to be together either.
It is only criminals that need to be sent to prison to be rehabilitated. Law-abiding citizens do not have to go to prison to be rehabilitated. In the same way, it is only Westerners who have to be forced to live with people of other races as a form of rehabilitation for their racism. We don’t have to be rehabilitated this way because we have never been guilty of racism.
I truly suspect that this entire idea that the different races need to be forcibly integrated is actually the result of some people in our country becoming too extreme with their desire to copy the West.
If they were not so absorbed in wanting to be ape the Westerners, they should be able to clearly see that the reason why a person of a different race in Malaysia prefers to be with their own kind has no racist meaning behind it. It is just our preference.
We just prefer interacting with other races for 20 percent of the time while staying with our own kind 80 percent of the time. This is actually a very normal and natural desire that has been made into a sin by some overzealous components of our population who are too absorbed with copying the West.
To force Malaysians to assimilate as how Westerners force themselves to assimilate is akin to asking us to repent for the sins of the Westerners which we did not commit.
Rather than follow the Western model of being “color blind,” which is actually a just reaction against their racism in the past, we should perhaps just follow our own model of being “color aware” and treat people from other races as being different, as we have done for thousands of years.
I honestly think that the way forward for the country to rid itself of the racial tension we are perennially stuck with is by allowing each race in the country to continue having their own racial space, where they can be comfortable with people of their own race while being welcoming to other races, as we have been doing for thousands of years.
Rather than force UiTM to have non-Bumiputera students or Penang to have an Indian Chief Minister or the Malay states to have non-Malay Menteri Besar, why not just create more universities like TAR University or AIMST University for Chinese and Indians respectively and let the Chinese govern Penang and the Malays govern their own states.
For the Indians, I think maybe it is time that we also give them at least a city to govern, so that they too will have a place in the country to call their own. If the Chinese have a state (Penang) and the Malays have almost the entire peninsula, can’t the Indians at least have a city to call their own? If we can build cities like Cyberjaya or Putrajaya or Forest City from scratch, can’t we build a city for the Indians too?
The different races in Malaysia are likely just resisting the entry of other races into their domain because we are forced to do it. If we are not forced to do it, I am quite confident that we will make the necessary arrangements to make all of us feel welcome here.
As long as we force all the races to integrate with each other and become one people, or be shamed as being racist if anyone doesn’t comply, another 61 years can pass and we will still resist becoming one people, and our racial tension will only grow with time.
It is only if we stop forcing ourselves to repent for a sin we never possessed and just let everybody have their space, that we might stop being so defensive about “protecting” our domain from being taken away by other races, and maybe even start the process where we will be able to open ourselves to accept the other races as part of us over time.
Hundreds and thousands of years ago, this is how people in this land became one people despite coming from different backgrounds and ethnicities. This is how we will also be able to become one people someday if we just stop this irrational desire to ape the West in every single aspect and start showing more respect for our own ways and methods of doing things.
Nehru Sathiamoorthy is the author of “While Waiting for the World to end”. He was a columnist at FMT and a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, The Star, Malaysia-Today, MalaysiaNow, MalaysiaKini and Focus Malaysia.
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