The last pickings of race ideology

by Ooi Kee Beng

Thanks to the bloody war against Nazi Germany, Britain evolved in the history books from being a global empire that rationalised its conquests with ideas of racism into being the destroyer of racism.

This is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history, and there is certainly a lot we can learn from it about the writing of history and about how global paradigms actually do shift, especially when blood has flowed.

After the horrors of racism came home to roost in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and tens of millions had died in the process, European mainstream politics could no longer make use of the notion of "race".

From 1945 onwards, little support could be gained for arguments about purity of blood, and the notion of race in general. "Race" quickly became a political taboo in the continent of its birth.

In sync with the fall of racism and the discrediting of racialism, the empires of the West crumbled like black-and-white domino bricks. Throughout the world, once-inferior groups rose to take the reins of power and to rule themselves.

Although these empires easily disintegrated into states, the ethnic mix that commonly populates such structures would not separate as readily.

In many cases, the resulting nation-states had to come into being bloodily. The most dramatic of these was the partition of British India into the republics of India and Pakistan in August 1947 which left a million dead and displaced countless millions.

In some colonised areas, the Ideology of Racial Hierarchy was easily abandoned. However, white supremacy clung on, for example in regions like the breakaway Southern Rhodesia (1965-1975). It took its most prominent and disdainful form in South Africa, under the apartheid system that lasted from 1948 to 1993.

In British Malaya, one may say that the separation of Malaysia and Singapore in 1965 was necessitated by ethnic differences, in keeping with post-colonial trends elsewhere.

In order to neutralise ethnic tensions and put them out of play, Singapore took the short cut of strictly classifying ethnic groups so as to guarantee the right for each to learn its mother tongue, and for prevent residential segregation along ethnic lines.

In Malaysia, affirmative action in favour of the majority Malays was implemented in 1970 to correct socio-economic imbalances. However, this initiative has been warped to institutionalise racialist thought over the years, and its time limit discarded.

The Ideology of Racial Hierarchy, now backed by religious arguments, thus managed to survive in Malaysia, which thus has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the last bastion of a divisive principle of social organisation imported once upon a time into the region by colonial conquerors.

Thus, Malay supremacists can be seen freely expressing their racism in the mainstream press in a way that would lead to immediate and harsh government sanction in most other parts of the world.

Given the historical presentation above, we are hopefully seeing the tail-end of this overextended global phenomenon.

The swiftness with which the discourse of race was thrown into the rubbish heap of history, at least in Europe, was aided by the ideological dynamics of the Cold War that immediately followed the Nazi defeat.

The paradigm of class struggle rapidly and thoroughly came to define international relations for half a century.

With the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, global capitalism took over as the discursive solvent of ethnic differences, wherewith the absorption of all human economies in the global melting pot is assumed to hold the potential to defuse group tensions.

For now, the main challenge to global economism – aside from its periodic collapses and increasing environmental destruction – seems to be the various forms of religious extremism that have sprung up in recent decades all over the world.

Malaysia's position today in this evolution of political thought is determined by its sad inability to discard past mistakes. Not only did it keep alive the institution of detention without charge or trial used half a century ago against communist insurgents, it has also continued practicing the Ideology of Racial Hierarchy as if it were indigenous to the region.

Mahathir Mohamed once boasted that the West had to learn detention without trial or charge from Malaysia after the 9/11 bombings in New York. Hopefully, the West will not seek to re-import racist discourse from the country as well.

As it is, great interest has been shown by black-majority South Africa in Malaysia's New Economic Policy and its applicability there. Hopefully, the South Africans will be vigilant enough to note the sad tendency that affirmative action that is aimed at benefiting the ethnic majority holds to evolve into counterproductive and archaic racism. – opinionasia.com

Ooi Kee Beng is a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore. His latest book is titled, Arrested Reform: The Undoing of Abdullah Badawi (Refsa; Kuala Lumpur, 2009).

Article source: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/opinion/breaking-views/36835-the-last-pickings-of-race-ideology--ooi-kee-beng-