COMMENT | Institutional racism and adaptive M’sian psyche

COMMENT | Aug 24 proved to be a victory for the justice system, and indeed all Malaysians: former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak was given a sentence to match the severity of his crimes. To see a high-ranking Malaysian politician successfully convicted is a rarity.

Yet Najib and his crimes were just manifestations of much deeper and systemic challenges that Malaysia faces. These are potent and we cannot afford to lose sight of them because of one victory. 

Two of the most encouraging trends in the troubled world we live in have been the fight for gender equality and the search for racial justice through the rejection of all forms of racial discrimination.

Very few of us need to be reminded about the Me Too or Black Lives Matter movements, both of which originated in the US, but which have been persisting in different forms in other countries for decades despite not gaining mainstream media attention.

On racial justice, the documentation on camera of the murder of a black man by white policemen in the USA shocked millions around the world, yet this behaviour has been going on for decades.

The mobile phone just made it a lot easier to capture the evidence and share it with the world. That single event forced a discussion in the US and the wider Western world about systemic racism and white privilege.

In Malaysia, where by and large there isn’t thankfully this sort of systemic racial violence, the fight to reverse decades of institutional racism and discrimination against minorities seems to be gaining traction.

But there is one very interesting and distinguishing obstacle: those with political power – and the architects of this institutional racism – seem determined to hang on to a racist system because of this system’s ability to preserve their privileges, many of which are ill-gotten, and which helped create and normalise the systemic corruption that now engulfs the country. 

They seem oblivious to the fact that the world is rapidly pivoting away from oppressive systems like this, and will quickly find themselves on the wrong side of history. They seem to live in a time warp, unaware that Malaysians of all races will not put up with it forever.

The writing is on the wall. Just like apartheid in South Africa was dismantled, institutional racism in Malaysia will be torn down by forces from within and external.

The architects of this system are sadly the Malay political elite and their stewards (of all races) in an entire ecosystem they have created to perpetuate their control of a rent-seeking economy upon which they thrive, and which is wholly dependent on their ability to retain political power by shamelessly...