Which Malaysian culture is most superior?: A Mother’s Day musing
I recall an old Malaysian radio advertisement: “May Day … May Day… I’m itching all over!” I suppose this is the predicament we all are in when we speak of the “mother of all issues”: culture!
Mothers give birth to babies. Babies do not know what racism means until they learn from adults. And then they become defined through institutionalized racism produced by the Ideological State Apparatus. The child, is the father of Man, said a sage.
Where are we at, on Mother’s Day and May Day?
Are we more race-conscious now than ever before? Are we really in the postmodern era in which politics of identity is taking its linguistic and semiotic turn – in which the ugliness and the beauty of race and ethnicity is surfacing and rearing their heads? Do we need a better understanding of the word “culture”?
Cultural wars
We argue on which language is more superior, whose civilization originated first, to who this and that land belong to, or if God actually has a chosen people. We even go on a crusade and jihad based on the superiority of this and that culture and civilization. We then hear of suicide bombings in the name of this and that culture.
We let ourselves be shaped by theories of race and ethnicity. These theories were developed by those who think that human beings are material beings primarily and that race and ethnicity are constructs that must be made real. These theories might have originated from racists themselves.
We design systems of social dominance. We build our politics, schools, cultural institutions, organizations, youth movements, and all kinds of imaginary prisons based on notions of racial superiority. We design economic policies around these notions. We distribute justice based on them. We define citizenship based on these notions. We create imagined communities out of them. We then get trapped by the attempt to redefine what race, ethnicity, and culture means.
We include or exclude human beings using languages that gatekeep. We protect our economic interest using sophisticated language of institutionalized racism. The result: we see a manifestation of poverty based on the identification of race.
We then tried to correct the imbalances using the culture of Classical/Rostowian/Friedmanian economics and developmental/pluralistic politics. We used statistics to measure people and to argue of this and that distribution of the economic pie. We developed the culture of communalism based on the numbers we crunch.
