I find the current debate about dropping the “race” column from many official government forms in Malaysia to be quite amusing. My views on the artificiality of ethnic and even nationalistic groupings are already well advertised on this blog, so I won’t go into them again. On the surface, this move is reminiscent of the French government’s official policy to never collect such details about its citizens. The basic idea is that all French nationals are alike to the government. So long as you hold French citizenship, the government doesn’t care what colour your skin is and treats everyone equally.

Of course, in our case, our minister makes it clear that race information will continue to be collected in cases where it is relevant to bumiputra special priviliges, which means that this is a blatant public relations exercise that will do nothing to change the status quo. Not that anyone expected anything more from the National Front government. But wait, if we go back to that comparison to France, you’ll find that not only does the French government not collect information about “race” from its citizens, it also doesn’t collect information about “religion”. However, as all Malaysians know, not only do our official government forms contain blank spaces to fill in your race, they also contain spaces to fill in your religion. Are we supposed to infer that while the government doesn’t care about your race except when it comes to bumiputra privileges but it does care about your religion or did the minister simply forget that Malaysian government forms also contain that entry?

To me, none of this really matters. Even in France, academics who need to study the demographics of the French population simply bypass the lack of official statistical information on race and religion simply by analyzing names instead. Given two names, say, Michèle Alliot-Marie and Rachida Dati, it’s not hard to tell who’s white and who’s not. Even though I detest the practice of classifying people into races, it’s an undeniable reality in the minds of most people and should be fought against on that level. I feel that as long as this is true, it’s more useful for the government to collect this information than to pretend that the phenomenon doesn’t exist.

One point of contention in Malaysia when it comes to bumiputra privileges is whether or not the 30% equity target for the Malays as stated in the Malaysian New Economic Policy affirmative action plan has already been reached. The government insists that the target hasn’t been reached yet so the continuing existence of the NEP is justified. However economists argue that this is only true because the government fudges its figures, in particular by using the archaic par value as opposed to market value to measure the proportion of shares held by bumiputra. It’s easy to see that by selectively collecting race information in some cases and not in others, the Malaysian government can obfuscate the true picture even more.