WE now come to one of the three biggest sources of ecological destruction that almost no Malaysian on the peninsula recognises – certainly no politician nor civil administrator.
It is the hardened racial consciousness of Malays, Chinese and Indians. Surprised? We are led to think that our racial identity defines us, making us who we are.
Last year, lawyer and writer Ivanpal S. Grewal commented: “Almost everything is looked at through racial lenses. People are not interested in taking the common sense position and no one is able to cool down the friction. Everyone is the loser in this situation.”
The national chairman of a political party must have been speaking for all politicians when he insisted that MPs must never be silenced whenever they wanted to raise 2R (race and religion) issues. No MP voiced a dissenting opinion.
Last May, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Fadilah Yusof expressed concern over the persistent voicing of provocative racial sentiments on social media. But isn’t the political structure itself to blame?
Many official forms, including the Employees Provident Fund member registration form, require you to identify yourself by race (bangsa). It was far worse in pre-Malaysia days when there were only three boxes available: Malay, Chinese and Indian. The rest, including the indigenous forest tribes, had to tick “Others”.
Does any Malaysian realise that emphasing “race” is a violation of religious teaching? Islam teaches universal brotherhood and that moral character is the true measure of a person’s worth. Christianity also teaches universal brotherhood and that love in action, not racial identity, is what defines a person of good character.
Confucianism teaches that a harmonious society can only be created when all people are regarded as belonging to the same human family.
Hinduism teaches the spiritual vision of universal brotherhood and the equality of all people without consciousness of “race”.
How do racial identity and racial consciousness affect climate action? They disrupt efforts to reduce climate change by dividing the population into racial silos – like feudal enclaves within one fortress.
Occasionally there are clashes between inhabitants of different silos. We are like three separate armies defending a fortress against a fierce enemy at the gates that is growing deadlier. That enemy is climate change.
In contrast, our “three armies” are concerned with strengthening their racial identities and positions in society.
Climate change is one subject that our politicians are completely disinterested in because it is not regarded as a vote-getter. Politicians show no concern for the worsening heat in our cities.
This writer recorded the following temperature readings in the shade on four days last month: 34°C on May 16 at 6pm, 35°C on May 26 at 5.45pm, 30°C on May 28 at 5.30am (yes, long before dawn), 35°C on a cloudy afternoon on May 30 at 4pm. Fortunately, the heat broke for three days from June 6 to 8.
The high humidity in Malaysia exacerbates the problem: a nighttime temperature of 30°C with 80% humidity feels like 34°C during the day.
When temperatures hit 37°C for weeks on end, thousands of frail elders and sickly babies will perish. Let us see then if any politician will renounce their race and embrace the human race.
You cannot be a champion of climate action and racial division at the same time as the two mindsets are contradictory.
Climate action is based on religious principles whereas racial identity violates religious principles. So many race-obsessed politicians falsely claim that they are also defenders of the faith.
Perhaps PKR, the prime minister’s party that is truly non-racial in its composition at all levels, is best placed to instil in all voters the necessity of breaking the race chain.
Will it make a paradigmatic breakthrough or will it choose to fit in with the crowd?
In a 2019 address to academics at a university, the late eminent statesman Tun Daim Zainuddin said Malaysia’s multicultural unity fell apart when politicians decided to use race and religion to gain power.
He said the impact of race and religious politics on the Malays is that it made them feel that anyone who did not agree with them and everything that they did not agree with became a threat to Malays and Islam.
This politically-engineered fear of threats remains despite the fact that, as pointed out by Agriculture and Food Security Minister Datuk Seri Mohamad Sabu two years ago, the Chinese share of the population will fall to 20% and the Indian population will fall to 6.4% in 2040. This numbers game is well in the Malays’ favour.
Almost no one, certainly not the politicians and civil administrators, is aware of the scientific data proving that there is no Malay, Indian or Chinese race.
“Race” is a concoction brewed by European colonial scholars in the 18th century.
It began with the classification of humans into three primary racial stocks – Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasian – based on the Noah’s Ark family structure.
The three sons were imagined by scholars to be ancestors of the three racial stocks. The classification was later amended to five stocks, and a host of races sprang up from them.
At that time, it had not yet been discovered that humanity arose in East Africa and remained as one people without distinction for perhaps 200,000 years.
Out-of-Africa migrations then began, resulting in the entire planet being populated by humans.
There were already doubts in the 18th century on whether there were actually races because “race” is a term used in biology, with reference to a hereditary subdivision of a species.
“It is equally important that the word be used with the same exact denotation in anthropology,” writes world-renowned anthropologist A.L. Kroeber in Anthropology: Biology and Race.
All Malaysians must be taught to uphold the use of the word “race” only in anthropology and biology and never in politics.
A race is defined as an intermediate stage in the evolution towards a new species. “No biological races exist in modern humans. There isn’t enough variation in humans for our differences to qualify as races,” writes leading evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves in The Race Myth.
To qualify as a biological race, “the genetic distance between one population and another has to be significantly greater than the genetic variability that exists within the populations themselves,” he writes.
Human genetic diversity is low: humans are about 99.9% genetically identical to one another. Even the most genetically distant human populations – or so-called races – differ by only about 0.1– 0.15% of their genome. Most human genetic variation occurs within populations or so-called races, not between them.
The racial classification of Malaysians into Malays, Chinese and Indians is a dangerous social construction that moulds a false identity so that we remain forever separated into three distinct voting blocs for the sole benefit of politicians.
As Graves writes: “Race is a social construct, a myth in the service of social dominance.”
Politicians seek to heighten Malay racial consciousness so that the Malays will always vote only for them if they continue to ensure Malay supremacy.
In response, politicians standing on a Chinese base promise to ensure Chinese culture remains an integral part of the national fabric.
Climate change is the only absorbing topic capable of dissolving our racial partisanship, lifting Malaysians out of their racial identities and raising our consciousness as humans bond in genetic unity.
Sadly, our politicians lack the ability to achieve transcendent leadership.
As the comic strip character Shoe declares: “Politics is much too important to be left to politicians.”
However, we are ethnically different because of relatively minor adaptations to the separate geographical and cultural origins of our ancestors.
These minor variations produce different inclinations towards various diseases that doctors are trained to recognise. They also produce unique strengths such as the ability of Tibetans to live in a freezing mountain climate.
However, merely replacing the word “race” with “ethnicity” solves no problems. There has to be political and cultural inclusiveness for Malaysia to flourish with a rich diversity of talents.
What can voters do? Get our MPs to enact a law penalising the use of “race” in politics. Any MP or state assemblyman violating this law must be suspended for a full term without pay.
Anyone emphasising racial consciousness in a public arena shall be disqualified from candidacy in any political election.
For continually using the word “race” in defiance of science and religion, and for allowing politicians and civil administrators to keep harping on “race”, Malaysia loses another point.
Our climate survival score is down to -8, just two points from rock bottom.
Joachim Ng champions interfaith harmony. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
