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Monday, July 6, 2015

Let’s call a racist spade a racist spade

Racist attitudes are so ingrained in us that we are now extending it to the latest immigrants.
COMMENT
racis
For most of my life, I’ve felt like a foreigner ─ never really belonging regardless of where I was at whatever point of time.
I’ve spent what feels like a good part of my life, on the move. My first big move occurred when I was nine. We moved away from the relative peacefulness of Sabah where I had spent most of my childhood following my social activist father on trips to the pedalaman (interior) of Sabah and observing him as he talked and counselled the villagers. We next found ourselves in the lively clangour of Manila, Philippines, where my father spent a year and a half getting his Masters. After Manila, we finally settled down in the (relatively) small town of Kajang where my parents continued their social work among the Orang Asli and the immigrant community. Many years later, I would move again to the Subang-Petaling Jaya area, this time by myself to study and work.
It’s the old kampung-boy-big-city story.
One thing I took away from my childhood and from watching my father at work was an appreciation for people from other cultures. Whenever he gets the chance my father still reminds me “Say hello to them whenever you can. Smile. Say thank you”. In other words, they’re people too, and they deserve your courtesy and respect as well.
I was a little interested, then, when I heard of the government’s move to bring in 500,000 Bangladeshi workers.
From what I’ve seen, even in Sabah, people are surprisingly resistant to the idea of more immigrants coming in, unless they’re their maids. In fact, ask your friends what they think about this new move, and I can guarantee you that the general reaction is going to be: “What, more foreigners?”
It didn’t surprise me that local employers weren’t thrilled about the move. One contractor even asked why the government didn’t just give the jobs to the Rohingyas, who were already here. After all, why bring in even more foreign workers to steal the jobs of hardworking Malaysians? For that matter, “Damn foreigners are stealing all our jobs!” is probably something you’ll hear in any other first/second-world country as well.
It sounds like a good argument, doesn’t it? It kind of makes sense. But let’s forget the excuses (and valid reasons) we can give, and focus on why we really don’t want them around.
We just don’t like them, because we’re all racists. No two ways about it.
We try to justify ourselves. We give a million and one reasons why we don’t like them. We say “They’re thieves. They’re robbers. They’re uneducated. They’re terrorists. They’ll eat our babies”. Frankly, we’ll say something, anything that will help us justify our illogical dislike or hatred of them. And if someone disagrees, we’ll even throw in a personal anecdote of how some Bangla (I promise that’s the first and last time I’m using that term) stole our wallet, because that’s how you justify demonising an entire race.
Coming from Sabah, one thing I’ve noticed is that people here generally tend to be much, much more – all together now – racist. I’m sure anyone with East Malaysian friends has had the same thing pointed out to them a million times.
Throwing racial slurs around does not seem to be a big thing here. I never really noticed that back in Sabah. Maybe I wasn’t very observant when I was nine but you hardly hear racist remarks from East Malaysians.
Here, they are all around, even in primary schools. If you go to a Chinese school, you can bet anything that you’re going to hear some pretty juicy stuff from the mouths of kids. I’m not kidding. I personally believe that Chinese people, and especially Chinese employers, are the worst (or best) when it comes to being racist.
And it’s a terrible contradiction: the Chinese and Indians complain endlessly about being called pendatang forgetting that they’re essentially doing the same thing to the immigrants now coming to our shores.
We smuggle them here and force them to work for pay so low that we’d scream if that was what anyone paid our children. They are stuck right where we want them to be so we can take advantage of them.
The prevailing attitude does not allow the majority of our foreign labour (barring skilled professionals) to be anything more than what we imagine them to be.
We can’t expect them to be anything more than the thieves, robbers, and animals we paint them to be since we don’t really give them the opportunity to be any different.
Throughout the years, our country has become increasingly racially divided.
Racist attitudes are so ingrained in us that we are now extending it to the latest immigrants.
How easily we forget that we were once in their shoes!

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