Update: short exchange on Samarasan’s FB here.
In “The Need for Roots”, Simone Weil wrote, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul”. Writing in 1943, she talked about reconstruction of France and attempted to envision the institutions required for the spiritual flourishing of the society. Today, it’s a trite observation that the global, capitalist economy has uprooted many lives and when the mode of production is intimately linked to the fraught tension of ethnic relations, it generates sharp, enduring resentment. It is this broken promise of social mobility that animates Preeta Samarasan’s resentment in her recent article (found here).
There can be no faulting Samarasan for reflecting on her life growing up, the sacrifices that her family made or of the anguish she described when confronted with barriers that marked her and other non-Malays as second class citizens. These are experiences that need to be ventilated and confronted. Salience of ethnic division could not simply be swept aside. Her misstep (like many others) lies not in the emphasis on her life but the framing of her experience as a binary between Non-Malays and Malays, meritocracy and undeserving quotas and ultimately between good and evil. It ignores the much more complicated reality and is itself an extenuating force in generating class-based, inter-ethnic solidarity. In discarding nuance, the bleakness of absolute evil is set as a backdrop to her gleaming martyrdom.
When talking about ethnic relations in Malaysia, we are led to conversations on two things: (i) competing nations-of-intent with narrow ethno-centrism on one hand and multicultural, integrative nationalism on the other; and (ii) differences in life chances and on whether meritocracy or redistribution should be the guiding principles. New Economic Policy (NEP) and slew of affirmative action that came bundled with it were conceived in a time when laissez-faire capitalism of the first ten years of independence left the Malay, predominantly-rural community with nothing. The vast majority of the poor was the Malays and asset ownership among the Malays accounted for merely 2% of the total wealth. It was a society riven by inequality and to many, cleaved between the Indigenes and the Emigres. Redistributive tools were introduced, motivated partly by progressive aims of economic justice but also by economic nativism. Progressive values eventually faded away as its proponents lost the political battles, and redistributive tools came to be manifested in jingoistic forms, serving not as means to economic justice but as ends themselves — a proclamation of ownership and of supremacy.
As part of their repertoire to resist this ethno-centrism and the affirmative action policies that came along with it, multiculturalists and liberals (in a very Malaysian sense) came to extoll the values of meritocracy which at times, are bereft of acknowledgement of the different historical class locations that each community started with. To them, anyone with the right talent and hardwork could succeed. True enough, many middle class non-Malay families, realising that they have little by way of government cushion and even less from their capitalist elites, pushed themselves and their children to greater heights. Meritocracy became inseparable from our capitalist economy and redistributive tools came to be completely shorn of its progressive ideals and into the exclusive domain of ethno-nationalist politics. As both meritocracy and ethno-centrism came to be more dominant as value systems, progressive values of redistribution is further obfuscated, inflicting trauma and resentment among those who then regarded quotas and preferential treatment as simple apparatus of the apartheid. By now, we are familiar with the hushed jokes about laggard civil servants and tardy workers, with supposed progressives repeating the myth of the lazy natives propagated by colonists of centuries past.
This binary is one which Samarasan failed to escape and in turn, perpetuated.
Why is this harmful?
It has been said that in Malaysia, everyone feels they are besieged. This is partly because everyone is correct, to a certain extent. Of course, quotas are exclusionary — they are so by design. The alienation felt by non-Malays is because of the disconnect between the redistributive tools and a vision of the country that is shared. Of course, ethno-nationalism can devolve into unfathomable depths of bigotry. But they are also motivated by genuine concern over Malay poverty and inequality which in turn leads to characterisation of capitalist accumulation as “foreign/Chinese plunder”. Conversations have devolved into a situation where talking about ethnic inclusiveness precludes conversations on economic justice and economic justice has to come at the expense of multicultural ideals. If we are to move beyond this, the shape of our discourse and expressions of frustrations have to be bridging, and lambasting NEP uncritically and without nuance is not the way.
Two generations ago, members of my family — like so many others- were subsistence farmers. Bumiputera policies, with its focus on rural development and intense investment into education, had allowed children of peasant farmers to receive education hitherto limited to urban areas. The creation of boarding schools (all-Malay) further allowed them to receive the kind of education that minor bangsawan and the bourgeoisie were receiving. We were told of stories of our parents, as twelve year olds, having to pack their things into crowded trains, leaving families they would only see years later and arriving at their boarding schools with soot thick on their faces. We were told that they were overjoyed when they became firsts in their family to be admitted into universities. The education, exposure and the resources became the foundation that allowed them to enter the middle class, where they would then have more capacity to plan ahead for their children.
The subsequent decades of the NEP saw the burgeoning of the Malay middle class. Where it was predominantly non-Malay before the NEP, by the 1990s and 2000s the middle class came to reflect more accurately Malaysia’s overall demographic. Whether this is due to NEP is contested: Thomas Sowell in his book “Affirmative Action Around the World”, claims the impact is exaggerated while others, like Muhammad Khalid in “The Colour of Inequality”, hints that it was not extensive enough. The answer may lie somewhere in the middle but it is undeniable that the imprints of direct government intervention are palpable. Policies that Samarasan eschewed wholly as tools of oppressors are the very same levers that lifted the Malays out of poverty en masse.
The story of social mobility and middle class upbringing is not unique to me or just among the Malays. As we enter the middle class, we could begin to share ideals and aspirations held by the non-Malays. Freed from the shackles of desperation and from having to think about zero-sum contests over the nation’s resources, it is becoming more likely for us to share a more inclusive notion of Malaysia. To a certain extent, NEP facilitated this imagination.
Restoring Progressive Ideals
This is not to say that Samarasan was wrong to have felt the way that she did. Affirmative action is polarising and when it is unmoored from a shared objective, it is ultimately alienating. However, a blanket rejection of affirmative action policies and glorification of meritocracy ignores that people are born into a stratified society and their talents or lack thereof is mostly a matter of life chances, not strictly of individual merit. Unfortunately, over the years, ethno-nationalists have an almost exclusive hold over affirmative action in public imagination. Partly, the reason for that is the uncritical embrace of liberal ideas of individual advancement that ignores intergenerational effects of inequality to different communities. Paradoxically while some of us are conspicuous multiculturalists, we are still insensitive to lived experiences of cultures and communities.
My reluctance to let go of affirmative action is not because it is a panacea. On the contrary, its effectiveness in some circumstances is dubious. Its adoption is not to be done without caution. However maintaining an eye on group-based remedies at the very least would make us think about communities that we may overlook as a result of zealous focus on the individual.
A dramatic revision of the current affirmative action policies is sorely needed. Perhaps, it could be fine-tuned further to target a narrower group of Malays from specific regions and of specific income level. Perhaps, its gaze could shift completely to other communities: Orang Asal, stateless communities, refugees or ethnic Indians in specific regions. This could only happen if we reject a conception of society based solely on the individual and if we reconnect this particular redistributive tool to progressive aims of economic justice. We need to do this before we discover that many more of us are uprooted in this discombobulating world and are swept by the pitiless machismo of nationalism.
