THE CICAK.com

Does everything really have to be about race?

By RACHEL LEOW

“History is written by the winners,� it’s often said, and broadly speaking, this is taken to mean that the people who are left to tell the story afterwards tell it in a way that flatter themselves.

This privilege gives “the winners� a great deal of power. For example, historians today only have Ancient Rome’s version of the Roman-Carthaginian war, because Rome won: it wiped out Carthage and wrote itself into history as the heroic warrior empire we remember today.

A different example: Japan has suffered international condemnation in the recent past for essentially rewriting its textbooks to whitewash historical facts about the atrocities it perpetrated in Nanjing.

There are, however, different kinds of power. Rome had the power to determine its future legacy; Japan has the power to suppress or alter its past; but there is a kind of power that gets written into present society itself, constantly and invisibly informing the very way in which we think and speak about things. And this is the kind of power that shapes Malaysia today.

So the story goes

We all know the narrative. The “historic bargain� of Independence - in which the Chinese and Indians essentially traded equality for citizenship - solidified into a “social contract� after the tragic riots of 1969, out of a desire to avoid further racial instability.

Only Barisan, whose exemplary leaders “sacrificed� and “struggled� to deliver us into independence, is the sole and dedicated champion of racial harmony and equal citizenship; only loyalty to Barisan will save us from descending (once again!) into ethnic anarchy.

This is the story that gets spun out in our school curricula, and it has had a peculiar result: Malaysia’s concept of nationhood today, quite unlike that of nearly every other nation in the world, does not seek to transcend ethnic allegiance, but bases itself on ethnic stratification.

A nation divided

If you live in Malaysia, you probably don’t bat an eyelid at the mention of the Malay party or the Chinese party or the Indian party. After all, you might reply, don’t these parties reflect genuine distinctions in Malaysia? Isn’t race the only way to democratically represent the different allegiances and interest groups in our multicultural society?

In fact, the establishment of race-based parties simplifies our understanding of race to the point of caricature. There’s no room for nuance; the racial categories crystallise along the same boundaries eked out in the political sphere, making it too easy for us to generalise.

After all, if we can say “the Malay party,� saying “the Malays� is only a short omission away. And with such generalisations, stereotypes inevitably proliferate - the lazy Malays, the greedy Chinese, the unscrupulous Indians; the New Economic Policy (NEP) benefits the Malays and hurts the Chinese and Indians; the Chinese and Indians must not question the Malay special rights - in order that racial unity can prevail.

All these sentiments are hammered into us so many times and in such a plurality of ways that we simply haven’t stopped the interracial wrangling long enough to think: isn’t it a little strange that the only way we can think of to preserve our racial unity is to preserve our racial distinctions?

Isn’t it strange that we hanker constantly after multiculturalism, harmony and integration, but we only know how to do this by insisting on exceptionalism, division and difference?

In fact, race-based parties are not the only way. They’re the exception rather than the rule.

In most other democracies, the participating parties are based on ideologies. Think of the Labour and Conservative parties in England; think of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States; think of Socialist parties, or Liberal parties, or Green Parties.

In Malaysia, the ideology is race, and the racial basis of our party system is astoundingly exceptional, matched perhaps most famously by the racial basis of Hitler’s Nazis. Our NEP, for example, is essentially a polite, diluted but perhaps no less sinister form of the Nuremberg Laws. How have we come to regard this state of affairs as the norm?

A definition of power

This is the kind of power I referred to earlier: it is all to do with the way we are conditioned to think about things.

Because everything is couched in racial terminology, we cannot discuss anything without recourse to race. We don’t know how to step outside the language of race; we can hardly fathom the very idea that there might be other non-racial ways to order, define and talk about society. And to a frighteningly large extent, it’s education that imparts this racialised, caricatured vision of our world onto us.

Rather than teaching us how to think critically, education barrages us with the Rukunegara, with terms like kesetiaan, taat, hormat (loyalty, allegiance, respect) and “ethnic harmony,� it imbues us with a notion of citizenship that defines Malaysians first and foremost by their ethnicity, and then proffers a crude, Hobbesian set of alternatives: either kesetiaan to Barisan, with the promise of ethnic mutual respect, harmony and progress it embodies, or else ethnic strife, civil war, and anarchy.

This is why, at all costs, people must keep fulminating about race; this is why kerises must be waved, why the Chinese must carry on being indignant about the NEP, why we must have Chinese, Malay and Indian schools, why we are told repeatedly that it would be naïve to “forget race.�

The fact of the matter is simply this: if society continues to be mired within the language of race, a race-based government can continue its role as a racial mediator. That is, after all, its sole claim to power: that “Malays are in danger.�

If we “forget race,� we essentially forget the entire premise of governmental authority. This is how we’ve come to have race-based parties.

Malaysia mudah lupa (Malaysia forgets easily)

And so, history gets written in order that we never forget race. Histories of independence, of May Thirteenth, of the Malayan Union; histories of “UMNO’s struggle;� histories of our nation’s (Malay) founding fathers.

Why aren’t there any histories of the pre-Islamic Malays? Because “Malay� today is officially defined as Islamic; to remember non-Islamic Malays would destabilise the categorical understanding of a holistic “Malay� identity.

Why is there so much emphasis on Melaka’s history and so little on Kedah’s? Because Kedah used to pay homage to the Thai kingdom of Pattani (which government would rather forget), while the Melakan Sultanate practiced a useful policy of “absolute loyalty to the ruler� (which Barisan today recasts as “absolute loyalty to Barisan�).

Why is there so little history of non-Malay contribution to national development? Because the government must reserve the political privilege of national development for itself, in order to legitimate the centrality of “Malay-ness,� which they then can claim is crucial to ethnic harmony and the stability of the nation.

This is what it means to have history written by the winners: it is the power to determine what we shouldn’t remember, and more importantly, what we must never, ever forget.

Every time we clamour about “racial injustice,� every time we say “Malays are in danger� or “Chinese are being oppressed,� we are in danger of perpetuating these erroneous categories.

We are blithely whitewashing an infinitely more nuanced reality: that some bumiputeras are rich, but many rural bumiputeras are desperately poor; that Chinese both exploit and are exploited; that the NEP is really much more about elite power than racial power.

The concept of Chinese, Indian and Malay parties as the foundational units of “nation building� is an utter paradox; the latter seeks to unify, and the former seeks to divide.

It is our loss – and the insidious victory of our history-writers – that those who seek to divide us have managed to convince us that they are, in fact, doing so in the name of unity.

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RACHEL LEOW is a contributing writer for theCICAK.

Rachel is your average atypical Malaysian girl who aspires to great things, if she could only figure out what those great things are in the first place. She is currently doing her Master’s Degree at Cambridge and will hopefully be working on a PhD in future. Her one journalistic triumph was an essay published in the International Herald Tribune, which she wrote when she was sixteen and cannot bear to read anymore. She is compulsively anal about apostrophes. Visit her site.