Here is something that surprises most people. Most adults on earth cannot comfortably digest milk. Not a few of us. The majority. By common estimates, around two-thirds of humanity.
So the ordinary human body is the one that struggles with milk. The body that keeps drinking it into adulthood is the unusual one. That ability comes from a genetic quirk, most common among people of northern European descent.
Now the twist. A historian, writing recently in The Conversation, argues that lactose intolerance was, in a sense, invented. Not the biology. The label.
When milk surpluses were pushed onto people who had never drunk much of it, many felt sick. Scientists studied why. Somewhere along the way, the group that could drink milk was treated as normal, while everyone else was treated as broken. A plain human difference became a defect.
The historian gives the habit a name: nutritional imperialism. One group’s body as the standard, and everyone else’s as a failure to match it.
Sit with that for a moment. Because we do the very same thing. We just do not do it with milk.
We do it with race.
Ask around honestly and you will hear it. This race is good with money. That one is lazy. This one sticks only to its own. That one cannot be trusted in business.
We say these things at the kopitiam, in the office, sometimes to our own children, as though we were reading out laws of nature.
We are not.
We are doing exactly what those milk scientists did. Taking a mixed, complicated, individual reality and flattening it into a group verdict.
And we start young. In Malaysia, a child meets the boxes before the child can read. Malay. Chinese. Indian. Lain-lain, the box for everyone the first three cannot hold. A field on a form, filled in at birth and carried for life.
Here is what science keeps telling us, and what we keep ignoring. Human variation does not obey those boxes. Two Malaysians from the same box can differ more from each other than from someone in a different box entirely.
The lines we treat as deep are, like the milk story, mostly drawn by history, kept by habit and useful to somebody.
Take another example. Many people across Asia go red and light-headed after a little alcohol. There is a real genetic reason for it. Yet for years, it was framed as a deficiency – a body failing at something another body does easily.
Same move again. A difference, relabelled a defect.
Once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere.
So what does any of this have to do with Merdeka?
This month, the flag goes up on a million homes. This year is our 69th as an independent nation, under the official theme, Malaysia Madani: Kesejahteraan Dinikmati – a wellbeing meant to be shared by all, whatever their background.
Sixty-nine years.
And back in 1991, we were promised something sharper still: Bangsa Malaysia. One Malaysian people. It was the first of Vision 2020’s nine challenges.
Thirty-five years on, we are still, quite literally, filling in the box.
So here is the question worth holding this Merdeka.
When do we stop?
Not stop being different. The food, the festivals, the languages, the crowded and glorious variety of this place – keep every bit of it.
The thing to stop is the ranking. The quiet reflex that turns different into better, and better into worse.
A few things would help, and none of them need a new law.
First, catch your own tongue. The next time you are about to explain a person by their race, stop. Just stop. It is a habit, and habits can be broken.
Second, let our children mix before the boxes harden. A friendship made at eight, across a category, does more for this country than any slogan printed on a banner.
Third, judge the person in front of you, not the average of their group. Hire the individual. Promote the individual. Trust the individual.
A human being is not a statistic wearing a face.
We have managed it before, and we forget that. For the length of a badminton final, there is no box. Just a whole country holding its breath for the same player.
We know exactly how to be one people.
We simply choose, most days, not to.
The milk story has a gentle ending. Stop treating one body as the standard, and the defect vanishes. Nobody was ever broken. There was only difference all along.
Race in Malaysia can end the same way. Not by pretending we are all the same. By finally deciding that different was never the same as lesser.
The box on the form is not a fact of nature. It is a choice we keep making, year after year.
This Merdeka, sixty-nine years in, we could begin to make the other one.
That would be worth the flag.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent those of Twentytwo13.
