Tag Archives: racism

Politics

The infamous BTN

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The Biro Tata Negara (BTN) or in English, the National Civics Bureau, issue is something that almost everyone has always known about but rarely dared to speak out about. But once the cat’s out of the bag and the taboo of not talking about has been broken, there’s no shortage of people condemning it with their every breath. I guess I’m no different. In case there are any non-Malaysians reading this who have no idea what I’m talking about, it refers to a government agency run by the Prime Minister’s department that runs courses with the ostensible aim of promoting patriotism amongst Malaysians.

To that effect, it runs a series of courses for which attendance is obligatory for everyone wishing to qualify for a government job. However, many Malaysians have complained that the courses actually promote racism and seek to segregate the different ethnic groups that comprise the country’s citizens. The Malays in particular are consistently taught that they are special and hold a superior position with regards to the other ethnic groups while Chinese and Indian participants are taught that their Malaysian citizenship is not a right but rather a privilege for which they must be forever thankful to the Malays.

I’ve never attended one of these courses myself but I heard some very shocking anecdotes recounted by a friend of my wife about the course she was forced to take only a few years ago. This was part of a process that she had to go through to be hired as a public school teacher. I recall that the lecturer was described as being extremely provocative, to the point of shouting at participants even if that meant driving them into a rage or to tears. The Malay participants were constantly harangued with the question, “Are you Malaysians? Yes or no?” When they inevitably replied “Yes”, he would reply, “No, you are Bumiputera!”

This refers to the special classification assigned to ethnic groups recognized as being indigenous to the country, of which the Malays are by far the largest group, and hence accorded special privileges and rights under the national constitution. It goes without saying that this is resented not only by the ethnic groups not included under the bumiputera classification but also by more enlightened bumiputera who believe that such special privileges are a slur on their abilities.

Anyway the most interesting part about the experience that was related to me was towards the end of the course. One of the participants, a male Indian, was seen to be becoming more and more agitated as the lecturer spoke and looked like he was ready to start a fight then and there. The lecturer ignored him and just kept going. However, after he ended his talk, the lecturer took the time to take the Indian guy to one side to calm him down and told him not to take it too seriously and that he was just a guy doing his job. I honestly don’t know if that’s something to laugh or cry over.

Politics, Religion

No need to fill in “race” for official forms in Malaysia?

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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.

Politics

Just who is an African-American?

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I’ve done my share of railing against political correctness in this blog, so here’s another. As this news article from abc News relates, Paulo Serodio, a naturalized American citizen, is suing a New Jersey medical school, claiming that he had been harassed and ultimately suspended. His crime: for self-identifying as an African-American. The thing is, Mr. Serodio was indeed born and raised in Mozambique, but he happpens to be white, not black. From the article:

After Serodio labeled himself as a white African-American, another student said she was offended by his comments and that, because of his white skin, was not an African-American.

According to the lawsuit, Serodio was summoned to Duncan’s office where he was instructed “never to define himself as an African-American … because it was offensive to others and to people of color for him to do so.”

“It’s crazy,” Serodio’s attorney Gregg Zeff told ABCNews.com. “Because that’s what he is.”

The problem of course is that the term African-American doesn’t really mean an American citizen of African ancestry. Instead it’s a code-word for being black, but due to political correctness, actually calling someone black is considered offensive these days. In the US, being labelled African-American opens the possibility of being eligible for affirmative action programs and other forms of assistance that specifically target minorities, but the unstated assumption is that the aid is supposed to be directed to blacks, so things get ugly when a white guy calls himself an African-American.

More generally, this case represents yet another example of why special assistance directed towards specific groups based on their culture or ethnicity always run into problems of defining just who is a valid member of the targeted group. It just makes more sense to qualify aid using objective criteria, such as poverty, scholarly excellence etc. It’s just another case of trying to shoehorn people into pre-defined groups, instead of seeing them for the individuals that they are.

Games

Racism and Nationalism in Medieval 2

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I’ve been playing Medieval 2 Total War for a while now. I’d passed on it when it was first released in late 2006 and only bought the Gold edition including the Kingdoms expansion earlier this year. Easily the most popular choice of nation when playing the Medieval games is England, partly due to a combination of cultural familiarity, its easily defensible starting location and the excellence of English longbowmen. I tried my first game with the Venetians who start out with a great navy but whose provinces are actually separated from one another but couldn’t make much progress. Venetians get hemmed in too much by their Italian cousins, the Milanese and the Sicilians, as well as the powerful Holy Roman Empire to the northwest and the Byzantine Empire to the east, so I ended up having to restart my game as the English in which I’m handily conquering the whole map.

One of my favourite things about this new version of Medieval are the pre-battle speeches that your generals make. The speeches made their debut in Creative Assembly’s previous game Rome Total War, but they’ve been greatly expanded here. Each major nation now has a different way of insulting each other and the personality traits of the general making the speech also influences what gets said. Check out the YouTube video I linked to for a great selection of these speeches. Playing as the English, my generals have called the French wine-sodden and arrogant, the Germans pox-ridden, the Sicilians sons of Satan and the Danish “scrofulous”, whatever that means. It’s awesome and doubly hilarious when a drunken or even outright insane general spouts off some utterly nonsensical stuff.

On a vaguely related note, here’s an Ebay listing for what must be the coolest auction ever. For the princely sum of least twenty five thousand British pounds, you can own a full size replica of a Roman siege catapult. It was built for a television show and now doesn’t fire, but it would be the perfect lawn ornament if you happen to live in a castle!

Politics

Nationalism is bad, okay?

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This post in an expansion on comments that I made in response to a post by Jed Yoong on her blog. I’ve so far refrained from commenting on the political situation here in Malaysia because I don’t have anything original or new to add to the already deafening cacophony out there and I don’t like to point out the obvious. In many cases, however, when a particular strand of public opinion becomes very shrill and one-sided, I feel a compulsion to throw some cold water on it. Chalk it up to my contrarian nature or maybe it’s just because I despise arguments that leave no room for doubt of any kind.

What’s gotten me riled up is the widely held sentiment that the racist politics of Barisan Nasional ought to be replaced with a multiracial Malaysian Malaysia. Yes, the BN are racists. Big deal, but we’ve known that forever. And again, yes, a multiracial Malaysian Malaysia is a great thing, sure, but playing it up too much edges things too uncomfortably close to nationalism for me and recent anti-immigrant sentiment in Malaysia is already too negative for my tastes. As I noted previously, if racism is bad because it shouldn’t matter what your genetics are, then nationalism ought to be bad as well because it shouldn’t matter where your mother happened to physically be when she went into labour. Am I the only person who finds it ironic that so many Malaysians blame current immigrants from places like Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines for their troubles when so many are descended from past immigrants themselves?

Similarly, I’ve read multiple commentators saying to the effect that sports are a great way to unite Malaysians across the racial divide. Does that mean that whichever country is currently playing against our national champion is the enemy? Does that make anyone who supports a non-Malaysian in any sports match against a Malaysian a traitor? Why does it always have to be one group against another group?

I’m also troubled by the assertions of Chinese and Indian Malaysians that they deserve equal rights as Malaysians because of the past contributions of their ancestors in developing the country (with the Chinese being especially fond of pointing out that they were the one who fought off the Japanese). The problem with this is that it assumes that such rights have to be earned as opposed to naturally accruing to anyone who wants to live permanently in the country and implies that new immigrants shouldn’t have those same rights because their ancestors didn’t make similar sacrifices. If it is not morally correct to blame the current generation of Germans, for example, for the actions or even antipathy of their grandfathers during the Holocaust, is it correct to credit a people for the beneficial actions of their ancestors?

The idealogy diametrically opposed to nationalism is of course cosmopolitanism, and the Wikipedia page on it is a worthwhile read.