Cultural Injustice, Material Inequality

In the aftermath of the Lowyat fracas, there has been many enlightened individuals
who are calling for moral restraint and the need for self-disciplining to eradicate racism in
our society. This position is flawed as it overlooks the structural origins of racism deeply
rooted in our society. Racism is not simply manifested in our society because people are
immature, immoral, uneducated or trouble-making. Racism is a product of our
systemic flaws, and making the Lowyat incident a moral issue is sidestepping the urgent
need for reforms. In doing so, we are almost guaranteeing the return of violence in the
future.
Understand why racial relations are so tense requires understanding the concept of
cultural justice and material equality. The need for economic equality is well
understood. A deeply unequal society is unstable for democracy. In the context of
Malaysia, restoring cultural justice was deemed necessary because of the humiliation
suffered by the natives under the colonial government. Designating the Malay language
a national language, giving traditional Malay customs an official recognition are
examples of giving recognition to the status of Malays. Both must be viewed as equally
important tasks by a postcolonial government to remedy racial tensions and to rebuild a
nation.
As Charles Taylor has noted, nonrecognition or misrecognition...can be a form of
oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, reduced mode of being. Beyond
simple recognition, it can inflict a grievous wound, saddling people with crippling selfhatred. Given the importance of a Mans self-worth and dignity, social or cultural
injustice might supplant material inequality as the more important problem. A Mans
identity is afterall more personal than his material worth.
Despite a long period of more than five decades to remedy the problematic social
and economic inequality in society, our government has yet to produce credible results.
The problem, as I see it, is that an over-compensation of humiliation suffered by the
Malays has overflowed to become cultural domination of other races by the Malays.
Moreover, riling up the issue of social injustice of the Malays have often been used to
disguise the poverty of ideas in dealing with deeply embedded income inequality
problem.
Revealing the problems of our present regime requires attacking its formative policy:
the New Economic Policy (NEP). Rather than solving the problem of economic
inequality, I see the set of policies as merely trying to restore the cultural dignity of the
Malays. This was deemed important because the divisive rule of our colonial masters
has resulted in a belief that the Malay population will never be as successful as Chinese
entrepreneurs due to lazy cultural traits endemic to their civilization. This message,
preached so frequently by prominent Malay leaders and fed to children by parents, and
schoolkids by their teachers has resulted in a historic low in Malay psyche and selfworth.
The New Economic Policy is designed to construct a class of Malay elites on par
with the Chinese entrepreneurs and business class. This is an important task, because
by cultivating a group of successful Malay entrepreneurs, can we finally proclaim that the
Malays have made it. Rather than collectively raising the Malay population out of
poverty, the NEP and its misguided focus on equity ownership policies are designed to

benefit selective individuals. It is in this sense the the NEP is not an economic policy, it is
a cultural one. Only by demonstrating the possibility that Malays have the potential be
successful entrepreneurs can we raise the cultural profile of the Malay race. Of course, it
cannot be denied that the NEP has a economic dimension, but the contention is that the
cultural purpose supersedes the economic ones.
This is not only a problem confined to the sphere of public policy. In other areas,
conspicuously the urban form of Kuala Lumpur, a sense of Malay dominance has to be
introduced. Any traits of Chinese-ness in road-naming is Malaynized. The architecture of
Maybank, the twin towers and Putrajaya has to obey a strict code of Malay style. To be
so focused on the Malay-ness is a distraction, a sidestep from the true reforms to our
system. Perhaps this language of architecture would return some form of cultural justice
to Malays, allow them to finally feel like owners of their land, but is this more important
than economic justice?
To truly move on from this quandary of endless racial violence, we have to be
completely clear that what the government has done for the Malays since independence
has only dealt superficially with the cultural diginity of the Malay race. To truly emerge
from this, we have to focus on the economic problems of inter- and intra-ethnic
inequality. To be so ingrained in the rhetoric of humiliation or cultural injustice is a
distraction from the more urgent and important reforms of economic nature.