Losing the Malaysian race

“Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm saying?”

― Cormac McCarthy ( No Country for Old Men).

COMMENT | I really liked Zan Azlee’s and Fa Abdul's recent pieces in Malaysiakini, "Malaysia: Race to finish" (wonderful title by the way) and "How do we fight this losing battle".

The simple answer, for the former, is that it was not all that great in terms of race relations back in the good old days (simpler maybe) and for the latter, you do not carry on fighting a losing battle – (the three options are) you retreat and regroup, you surrender or there is always martyrdom.

I like both pieces because both ultimately point to the dysfunction of not the ruling coalition but rather the opposition. I realise that this may not have been their intent but these questions they pose is because there is no real alternative to the policies and ideologies that define the mainstream political discourse in this country.

Zan you ask, “Did it really mean that people of that generation or during that time period were really colour blind and they did not think of race at all?” and the answer is "no".

If people of that generation did not think of race, they would not have voted in
successive race-based coalitions and go along with the policies of the state with May 13 as some sort of reminder that we all had our place even though we superficially got along in our workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.

We did it for selfish reasons and while the opposition had its supporters and was eking out a political living, oppositional voices were never mainstream. Most folks just did not have time for the “serious stuff” that Fa Abdul writes of because the serious stuff is not governmental malfeasances (this is the mundane stuff) but rather the systems of oppressions that the opposition used to address but these days have to sublimate for political reasons.