i walked into my new favorite breakfast place and the owner came over to me to say they were reversing their reversal and would now cook an egg a second way. this made me happy, because it was good to see something change for the better. while thanking him, he said thank you to me in return. his point was that i needed to tell them what i wanted, so they could change.
when my special order was brought over the women at the table next to me asked me what i was having. i told them, they laughed and told me the same thing had happened to them last week, and announced the next time they came in they would order the same thing because it looked so good. the table next to them was listening in on our conversation and called the waitress over to see what i was eating. a movement has begun, welcome to the breakfast sandwich revolution. it all started with someone asking for something to change, and those in power to listen and respond. the happiness is spreading.
as i was enjoying my coffee and surfing wikipedia, i heard the women at the table next to me mention my company by name. i leaned over and asked if i had heard correctly. i had and the simple question turned into a 20 minute conversation. one of the women had spent three years in the US, and is now struggling back in her native country. she talked about the culture shock of returning and brought up how hard it is to live within a racist country. this is a common conversation here, people talk about it openly, but it's bollocks and it would help if they stopped talking about one thing when they mean another.
american's have a reputation around the world as being simplistic and rude. we are made fun of because we do not travel outside our country and do not understand the world. the political system in the US is contentious, but it is also stable and effective. our government is passed back and forth between the parties, and even when we have election issues like the ballet crisis in florida that elected bush, the system works. the parties use division, but it is less and less about race; or only indirectly.
american politics are about religion and economics. the GOP is seen as the party of the fundamentalist religious right, they are for small government, low taxes, and would like to use christian values to direct the country. the democrats are on the left, they are the party of the working man, suspicious of big business, believe government should be used to protect those least able to protect themselves. at times this has been portrayed as the white business man against his workers of color, but those days are gladly disappearing. the courts helped to wash that away, enforcing the equality and freedom of stupidity guaranteed by our constitution.
my hippie parents were a great example of working class amercians. they came of age during the 50s and 60s, they have lived through the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll years that were part of the amercian social upheaval. my father worked and socialized with friends across color, religion and economic boundaries. i remember him waving to a person on the street, and then under his breath saying something rude; drunk-bastard, stupid-wop, nigger all passed his lips over the years. did this make him a racist? he would say he was just calling a spade a spade.
when i dated an african american in high school he pulled me aside and warned me it was going to be hard. the thing was, he was right, it was harder than normal. we had social differences, and they didn't make connecting any easier.
dad could use harsh words, but he could also open his doors to people of all colors. i remember sitting at thanksgiving dinner next to a man who scared me most of the year. his name was sherwood, he was a neighborhood alcoholic who could get mean when he drank. as kids, we knew to give him a wide birth while he was drinking. when i asked my father why he was coming to dinner, my dad looked over and reminded me that sherwood had no one else to have dinner with. he told me that no matter how little we had, we needed to help those who had less than us. race didn't matter, we would help those around us regardless of color or lifestyle. this doesn't sound racist to me, it is advice everyone should get from their father.
as i look at malaysia, i don't see racism. i see people trying to live their lives. i see self-imposed or socially-supported segregation all over, but at least in my MNC world, there is little open hatred or hostility. the social rules, enforced by the asian shame culture are the root of the evil here, and people have little capacity to honestly question it. segregation happens with the practice of endogamy, enforcement of semi-halal rules, and educating children in religious or language segregated schools to ensure they are indoctrinated into a foreign culture. these all happen at the expense of creating a single culture, and is universally accepted as proper.
the US has a program of affirmative action, meant to protect the rights of minorities and level the playing field. for the past 50 years it has been illegal to "discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of sex, race, creed, color, or national origin". affirmative action was at times implemented as quotas, but in the past decade that was rolled back because it unfairly selected minority candidates over the majority. much like affirmative action rules all over the world, the issues in malaysia are not truly about race, they are about preferences that help some at the expense of others.
last week, local newspapers had coverage of 100 ethnic indians being arrested, and more threatened with water cannons, for attempting to march against a book called "interlok" being added to the school curriculum. the book includes a plot line of indians coming to malaysia 60 years ago, and bringing their cultural standards such as caste system with them. having been here 5 years, i can tell you the caste system is still echoing in the indian culture. is it racist to have a book written in a different time point out the realities of that time? someone here should read "to kill a mocking bird", a book that helped white amercia come to terms with itself.
last week the newspapers also had coverage of a debate on stopping the practice of asking for race on applications. this is not just for employment, it is done on almost all applications in the country, not really a shock for a country that lists religion on your identity card (IC). but honestly, if you had a stack of applications with names like "adbul", "ganish", "chew" and "fernandez" would it be difficult for you to select based on "racism"? more importantly than not asking, make sure it does not matter. a level playing field is the only way to do that, and for it to be level, there should not be teams competing with referees who care who wins able swing the game.
i live and work around malays, chinese, indians, japanese, iranian, egyptian, burmese, indonesians and koreans and an assortment of other expats. i see mixed marriages of all sorts, those that work well and those that do not. i watch groups of people at tables all over this country and see the high level of mixing that takes place. i also see many more tables that are a single race. but those are self-imposed choice, not a conspiracy of racism that malaysians talk about.
if malaysian's don't like their political parties that are divided by race and unified by the political segregation, they should change it. there is no lack of talk about it, but nothing happens because they are taught to stay in their correct place and do what the society expects. this is the heart of living within a shame society:
shame is a reaction to ... our failure to live up to our obligations and the expectations others have of us. in true shame oriented cultures, every person has a place and a duty in the society. one maintains self-respect, not by choosing what is good rather than what is evil, but by choosing what is expected.
if there is racism here, it is that each group refuses to give up the expectations they have for those in their own group. it is not driven by the other groups, but by each of the groups within itself. there is no cultural agreement on "one malaysia" because there is no single set of rules. imagine the stadium in bukit jalil, with four different sports being played at one time, and each team pointing to each other and complaining they are not being treated fairly because they do not have enough of the field.
my father the plain talking, and obnoxious, american would have looked at this and shook his head. he might have said, "this is an useless as a tit on a bull"... i can imagine three cultures offended by that johnism, but with typical self-imposed segregation i doubt they could agree on the word that was offensive.
malaysia is not racist, but it is also not multicultural, if so it really would be 1Malaysia.
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multiculturalism has come to mean the advocacy of extending equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups without promoting any specific ethnic, religious, and/or cultural community values as central.
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