Salary Theorem

Learning to be an open society

[Comment by Anak Malaysia – An old article dated 29 August 1999]

 

Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad’s “From the UN” series of articles are at: http://www.mir.com.my/lb/un/index.htm].

More on the author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Ahmad

http://oxbridgemalaysia.com/news/041018.htm

 

Learning to be an open society 

by Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad

 

I was raised in a wholly Malay environment and educated exclusively at Malay School and the Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) except for a year at the Sultan Ismail College Kota Baru, a multi-racial institution but with a huge Malay majority.

On Being Malay…and becoming racist

A very well-meaning professor asked me once why it was so important to me to include “minority rights” and “minority issues” into my public policy discussions. He also suggested that I discontinue this way of thinking because 1) it would tire me, to keep thinking of everything through the lens of a race divide and 2) the people whose cause I push so hard for probably don’t even care themselves. He likened this to how he was a strong proponent of “working class”-centric issues in his younger days, until he realised that it was a lost cause for the skinhead thugs and soccer hooligan types would never really appreciate the struggle of policy-making and implied that they would never change[”most of them end up Neo-Nazis.”]My prof’s situation and mine are not analogous, really. He saw the group he sympathised with as a distant demographic strata. And as the son of a wealthy businessman, he never walked in their shoes. He never, ever had to be identified as one of them, never had to feel their struggles as his own, watch his people be fucked over senseless by a country that villifies them while tolerating them with an air of condescending pity.