The Chinese must confront anti-Malay racism
Reactionary, juvenile ‘he started it first’ attitude when discriminating against others will not solve anything.
Sebastian Loh, Free Malaysia Today
I remember working late at one of my previous jobs – only my boss, a colleague, and I remained in the office. We had recently hired a few new Malay employees but they had already left for the day.
Taking advantage of this, my boss turned to my colleague, who had a hand in supervising the new staff, and casually asked, “What do you think of our new Malay staff? Are they okay?”
The questions made me sick to my stomach because they implied that Malays are somehow less capable or less hardworking. But that experience really encapsulates the steep discrimination Malays face in the private sector.
And that’s not just a one-off story – there’s compelling empirical evidence that confirms this.
Several years ago, researchers Lee Hwok-Aun and Muhammad Abdul Khalid published a landmark study on the effects of race on private sector hiring.
The paper titled “Degrees of Discrimination: Race and Graduate Hiring in Malaysia” concluded that, “Malay job applicants are significantly less likely than Chinese applicants to be called for interview”.
Additionally, the researchers noted that “Malay-controlled companies are less likely than Chinese-controlled companies to call a Malay applicant for interview”. But that obscures the far more disturbing aspects of their findings.
It is true they found that Chinese-controlled companies called Malay resumes (applicants) at a marginally higher rate than Malay-controlled companies (3.8 per cent and 3.4 per cent respectively). But what’s more important is the ratio at which these firms called Malay and Chinese applicants.
A look at the study’s data reveals a stark contrast: Chinese-controlled companies called an astounding 6.3 Chinese applicants for every Malay applicant they called. Malay-controlled companies, on the other hand, called 1.6 Chinese applicants per Malay. So while it may be politically inconvenient to swallow, it’s not difficult to infer that racism is significantly more entrenched at Chinese-controlled firms.
This is not a call for mobs with pitchforks to swarm the nearest Chinese company. But it’s high time that we in the Chinese community come to terms with the facts: Yes, Malays face severe discrimination in the workplace. And yes, Chinese people have a lot to do with that discrimination.
For years, these accusations (and even the aforementioned study) have been met with fierce dismal and defensive arguments from many Chinese. In response, they rail against government favouritism and point to the discrimination they face from government policies.
But how does that reactionary and juvenile “he started it first” attitude solve anything?
Today, Chinese Malaysians are arguably the first to complain about worsening race relations in the country. So how do we go about fixing that?
