Yes, sack all racist leaders
Any politician, government or opposition, who claims to represent the people must represent the people as a whole.
Scott Ng, Free Malaysia Today
Gerakan President Mah Siew Keong had it right when he suggested that Barisan Nasional sack racist leaders from the coalition. It’s high time that our politicians were made accountable for the sentiments they mouth, the hatred they inflame, and the people they let down. The current political climate is wretched and something must be done to let in at least a modicum of warmth.
However, even if we got rid of all the racist leaders, we still would not be addressing the problem at its root. The root lies with the concept of race-based parties. While race-based parties are not racist by nature, the idea of a party fighting for the cause of a race will attract extremists drawn by the perceived nobility of the cause. And extremists being extremists, they will use any means necessary to have their views heard, drowning out the majority and establishing their own base within the party, drawing followers attracted by their extreme message. And when these fanatics rise to leadership in the party, the cycle starts all over again.
Malaysia’s race-based parties have their beginnings in the British divide-and-conquer strategy, which involved appealing to communal sentiments. This made it easier for the colonisers to rule. Some historians have also argued that anti-Chinese sentiments have their roots in the Japanese occupation as well, as Malay paramilitary units were used to combat Chinese guerillas, installing an us-versus-them mentality amongst some elements of the respective communities.
Remnants of the past
So why are we clinging to the remnants of our past of servitude and oppression under foreign powers instead of forging our own way forward? Why are we using race as a benchmark when the concept of race is just a classification system to denote which region of the world a person originates from? It’s an increasingly irrelevant system considering that globalisation is seeing people from all over the world congregate and assimilate within societies they adopt as their own.
Humans will always find one way or another to classify each other. Race, religion, colour—all have been used as excuses to create the worst strife that we have seen, and even if those concepts were to cease being an everyday reality of being human, we would doubtlessly find some other reason to quarrel with each other.
But we could definitely find better things to fight about.
We often hear the phrase “social construct” bandied about in debates on the concept of race. What this means is that there is no biological basis for the concept of race and “no relationship between classification based on observed physical characteristics and patterns of thought or behaviour.” (Michael P Jeffries, Paint The White House Black, 2013.) With this in mind, we observe that there are no subspecies or races within the human race as a whole, as opposed to the condition some animals find themselves in. Hence, race is a “social contruct” in that it is a product of human thought and interactions, and not a fact of life or science.
“What we call ‘race’ is an invention not of nature but of our social institutions and practices.” (Joseph L Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, 2002.)
History has shown that by and large, race as a mechanism has been used to appropriate resources and rights, often in a lopsided distribution of either, due to the preferentialistic traits shown by “racial tribes”. This then leads to social inequality as the ultimate product of racial ideas and policies.
