Like many concepts with which we interpret the reality of our world, the ideas of race and racism suddenly assume protean shapes once we try to wrestle them to the ground.

Sim Kwang Yang
SIM KWANG YANG was DAP MP for Bandar Kuching in Sarawak 1982-1995. Since retiring in 1995, he has become a freelance writer in the Chinese-language press, and taught philosophy in a local college for three years.

He is now working with an NGO in Kuala Lumpur, the Omnicron Learning Circle, which is aimed at continuing learning for working adults and college students. Suggestions and feedback can reach him at: kenyalang578@hotmail.com.
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In a country like Malaysia, the idea of race has been institutionalised in law, and it colours our perception of political, economic, and social issues in every way. In fact, it has become the premier category in terms of which we determine our self-identity and our self-image. We look at our world through spectacles called bangsa, so to speak.

When that sacred name of our respective race is uttered, the powerful emotive response surged forth from deep within our guts, despite ourselves, and beyond the ken of all reason. Racial sentiments have been so embedded in the depths of our soul, that I suspect more than a few Malaysians would be prepared to sacrifice their life in defence of their race against real or perceived threat from another race!

Beneath the veneer of racial harmony so much touted by our political leaders, these racial sentiments are everywhere, through tacit or explicit messages in our mass media, in our workplaces, our family homes, and wherever people from different races are compelled to conduct social intercourse.

Therefore, you would imagine that people know a great deal about what "race" and "racism" means.

Not so. Under cross-examination, people would usually respond with a whole host of uncritical views, sheer prejudices, and half-remembered rhetoric from some politicians, or even outright sophistry beyond any possibility of communicative discourse.

Years ago, I started to read profusely on the subject. Most published social scientists and commentators are Westerners of course, and apparently it is a serious problem in many Western countries as well, especially in the US.


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Potent source of conflict

With massive movement of human population on an unprecedented scale across national borders in the last century, the ethnographic structure of many societies has been changed beyond recognition, and xenophobia has become a world wide disease. All over the globe, the issue of race is the one single most potent source of bloody conflict. At the moment when you are reading this article, somebody somewhere is probably killing or persecuting another person in the cause of his race.

Exactly how many million people have perished in racial killing is a matter of pure conjecture. We all know about the six million Jews killed in mass assembly fashion during the Second World War. What is less known, is that during the Holocaust, the German Nazis also wiped out a few million people from other minority groups, the Slavs, the Gypsies, and so on.


After the War had ended, the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was meant in large part to stem out racism as a political ideology. Since then, Nazi Germany has been portrayed as the epitome of a racist state. Anti-racism has become politically correct among the liberal population of many Western democracies, even though the spectre of racism continues to haunt them.

Therefore, from the 1960s onwards, many UN agencies such as Unicef and Unesco have tried deliberately to steer clear from the use of the term "race", replacing it with "ethnicity" and "ethnic groups", when referring to the diverse communal groups of the world.

But alas, the only lesson we learn from history, is that we can never learn from history.

The end of the WWII saw the mushrooming of new nation-states which gained independence from their former colonial masters. Many of these like Malaysia have an artificial national boundary, an alien form of political organisation, and a heterogeneous population struggling to define what nationhood means for them. It is almost natural that racism should find ample fertile soil in these newly emergent states. Again, official and unofficial racism has caused unimaginable human sufferings to millions of ordinary people like you and me.

The success story of the end of Apartheid rule in South Africa is satisfying, although it was achieved at terrible human costs. The greatness of Nelson Mendela lies in his statesmanship in attempting national healing and reconciliation, rather than embarking on a bloodbath of retribution against his former tormentors.

Elsewhere, the story is not so pretty. Not so long ago, the conflict between the Tutsi and the Hutu people in Africa resulted in the massacre of a few million people over a short period of a few months, while the world stood by and watched. This glaring tragedy may be just the tip of the iceberg. How many incidents of racial violence escaped the attention of the world media is again a matter for speculation.

The false peace imposed by the Cold War for four decades might have diverted world attention from communal conflicts to ideological warfare between the Communist camp and the so-called Free World. Repressed but ever-present racial sentiments erupted anew after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

The genocide conducted by the Bosnian State in the early 1990s made fashionable the term "ethnic cleansing" in our vocabulary. It seems as if the Balkan Peninsula will always be condemned to periodic rounds of racial and ethnic convulsions. In 1999, advanced technology brought the vivid harrowing images of persecution against ethnic Albanians by the Serbian State right into our living rooms.

'Capable' normal people

Apart from State sponsored communal strife, seemingly unorganised spontaneous racial riots have also become a common feature in our global theatre. In his latest book The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Donald Horowitz did a comprehensive study on 150 or so riots in 50 countries in recent decades, mostly in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet Union. If anything is to be learnt from his findings, it is that perfectly normal people are capable of the most gruesome acts of violence during civil disturbances motivated by racial sentiments.

The burgeoning publication of works on the subjects of racism, ethnic nationalism, and the nation-state has become a new industry in the past twenty or thirty years. Scholars and social scientists disagree on a lot of things, but they seem to have arrived at a consensus on the distinction between ethnicity and race

Ethnicity has more to do with cultural identification, based on an individual's belief that he and other members of his ethnic community share the same culture embedded in myths, religion, literature, history, and a unique way of life. Ethnic nationalism is a political ideology which tries to legitimate the claim by an ethnic community that the political and the cultural unit must be congruent in a territorial state.

To a great extent, ethnic nationalism as the idea of an imagined community - has helped chart the course of world history. It has its roots in the formation of the first prototype of the modern nation-states in Europe. Its success was no doubt facilitated by the process of modern capital formation, and the increasing importance of the role of the mass media of communication. Like the idea of democracy and the parliament, the concept was spread throughout the world by the Euro-American colonial imperialists.

On the other hand, race is a concept based on blood ties, on the idea that members of a communal group share a common ancestry and a common lineage. Racism is a socio-political belief in the sanctity and the purity of the blood link, based on the premise that a person's moral or intellectual worth is somehow a biologically determined fact. By virtue of sharing the same gene pool, all members of a race are supposed to share the same moral and intellectual characteristics.

From these often unspoken axioms and premises, other racist propositions can be deduced, to be incorporated into a working world view. For instance, while the kind of Social Darwinism prevalent in Europe in the late 19th century has long been discredited, and the kind of eugenics pioneered by Dr Galton has become unacceptable in learned societies, these theories seem to have found a second wind in various mutated forms in our contemporary world.

Social Darwinism borrows heavily from Charles Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection. Here, the human world is analogous to Darwin's natural world of the jungle, and each race is akin to the species in that jungle struggling for survival. The race that survives "best" survival being measured in economic-military terms is the superior race.

Superior or inferior

Implicit in this pseudo-scientific analogy, is the assumption that races are either superior or inferior in relation to one another, and that such superiority or inferiority is predetermined at birth. Pushed to the extreme, members of the self-proclaimed superior race would see the existence of any perceived inferior race as an intolerable insult; and any mixing of their blood across racial lines through marriage or otherwise would be condemned. Official or unofficial policy of physical, cultural and political segregation often follows as a logical consequence.

Since the racial sentiment is so primordial, it is a handy instrument for quick political mobilisation, especially in times of political uncertainty, when the race appears to be confronted by the prospect of extinction by an alien menacing Other.

When the racist sentiment manifests itself at the political level, then the discourse is one of finger-pointing, portraying the race as the victim, and blaming all the sufferings and misfortunes of the race on the evil misdeed of another race. The language used will always be pregnant with naked hostility and veiled threats. In the ensuing mass hysteria, any self-reflective soul who dares to bring reason into the discourse and advise prudence will immediately be cast as a traitor to the race. He will be ostracised, hounded down and probably persecuted.

In the politics of race, the love of one's own race is extolled and glorified at the expense of intense hatred for members of the enemy race. At any frenzied moment, the power of blind hatred will demand the blood of the Other to be offered at the alter of their false God for the purpose of redemption. The politics of race is the politics of blood.

The politics of race is also the politics of mere head-counting. The racial sentiment which fuels such panic is probably the lingering instinct left over from the days when we still lived as herd animals. When the individual sees his survival as exclusively dependent on group survival, he follows his herd mentality, and abdicates from all sense of individual responsibility. Strength then seems to reside in numbers, guilt and conscience disappear in the facelessness of the collective.

To call this phenomenon "tribalism" is itself a racist remark. It is an insult to the many so-called "tribal people" of Sarawak with whom I have been acquainted for decades.

The most tragic part of this global phenomenon is that all systems of racist belief are based on false premises and axioms.

The idea that all members of a race comes from a common ancestor is itself a myth. It is probably the ungrounded extrapolation of our sentiments derived from our lived experience as members of a family or a clan. This myth cannot be literally true, without having our common ancestors committing the taboo of incest. And incest, as the science of genetics seems to indicate, is antithetical to group survival. survival.

Does a 'race' exist?

In his Theory of Natural Selection, Darwin was talking about the struggle for survival between different species of animals and plants. There is no scientific evidence to indicate that the different human races if such a thing as a "race" does exist can be comparable to the biologist's definition of species. In fact, recent research in molecular biology and genetics seems to indicate the contrary: the difference between the genetic make-ups of the different races is so insignificant, that all human beings of the world can still be regarded as members of the same species of homo sapiens.

In any case, Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution is just a scientific theory. Philosophers of science are still debating on what a "theory" is. According to Karl Popper's view, the value of any scientific theory lies partly in its falsifiability. In principle, any scientific theory must be capable of being proven to be partly false, no matter how widely-accepted it is. Charles Darwin would probably turn in his grave, if he knew that his scientific achievement has been distorted into Gospel truth for narrow political purposes.

In the end, we have no way of knowing the relation between our biological self and our moral, intellectual and spiritual universe. The ghost of Cartesian Dualism continues to haunt us to this day. I suspect it is not an issue that can be resolved by science. Therefore, to assign a causal determinist value to a person's moral or intellectual worth based on his birth is not only questionable on matters of fact, but it also constitutes a crime against humanity.

Racism is a crime against humanity because its judgement dehumanises human persons. It is guilty of the fallacy of reductionism, that error of labelling essentially complex entities such as "individual" and "community" in terms of a few very simplistic arbitary selective generalisations.

It dehumanises human beings, including the racist himself, because it denies the concept of freedom, by penalising people over something that they cannot control: their parentage. It denies the possibility of the individual's moral choice.

If it is so hard to talk about this sensitive subject, and well nigh impossible for some to define race, it is because our sense of the self is so bound up in the concept. To analyse the idea of race, is to dissect the self. It will be too painful for most people.

The solution is to try to jump out of your skin, so to speak, when you want to reflect on the race issue. Just suspend for a moment your conviction that you are a member of any race, except that of the human race. Then you may wrestle the devilish protean monster to the ground.

It is one of the ways to make our world a happier and safer place.