WALKING past a vacant plot opposite Tesco in Tanjung Tokong, Penang, recently, I saw sprayed on the barricades these angry words: “Uda juai hak Melayu serah kat Cina”. Another message read: “Malays leadership is bullshit”. The graffiti, conspicuous by its size and span, was right next to an old 2012 UDA Holdings billboard of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak with the quote: “Walaupun sudah 40 tahun, janji tetap janji … ia mesti ditunaikan”.

Yes, 40 years ago, the prime minister’s father had visited the Malay fishing village. In 1972, Tun Abdul Razak had then declared the centuries-old kampung as the seat of Malay cultural heritage to be preserved for posterity. The Urban Development Authority was tasked with redeveloping the area in consultation with the villagers. Today, the son is attempting to deliver the father’s promise.

I remember growing up in the neighbourhood in the early 1960s. Of barefooted children playing among the chickens and fishing nets under attap houses on stilts, the open bathing area with a community well, the nightly Quran recitals by candlelight, the muezzin’s call to prayer from the community masjid. All of that has given way to nondescript low-cost flats occupied by descendants of the original settlers.

Chatting with the locals occupying the few remaining old Malay houses and food vendors in Jalan Tanjung Tokong, which was hit by the 2004 tsunami, I got the impression that to them, the kampung warisan the prime minister’s father had envisioned is just a pipe dream. They are right.

The coastal road separates the old kampung houses from the luxury condos, boutique cafés, fusion restaurants and marina retail outlets — all built on reclaimed land. Two classes of community a stone’s throw apart. What do the villagers think of the racist graffiti, apparently directed at UDA Holdings’ joint venture with Penang-based Ideal Property Group to redevelop the area? Few would comment — at least not to a Chinese visitor asking sensitive questions.

During lunch with a Malay friend in Tanjung Bungah, we tentatively concluded that the graffiti is a sad indication of the deeply rooted race factor in the Malaysian psyche. We agreed that race and its assumed attributes impact how we feel, think and react to each other — hence the simplistic racial reactions to complex socio-economic crises.

Clobber Chinese commerce for exorbitant prices of goods and services; cite rich Chinese businessmen and families as potential ISIS ransom targets; brand non-Malays as “disloyal and ungrateful” when they deliberate on the legitimacy of the “social contract”, accuse dissidents of being “seditious” when they question Malay rights and privileges. Likewise, blame the Malays and Umno for one’s misfortunes, and for whatever is wrong in the country.

Even as the ultra-nationalist non-governmental organisations and Umno-owned Malay daily newspapers continue to reinforce the Ketuanan Melayu agenda and cast aspersions on the allegiance of non-Malays to 1Malaysia, which in the politicisation of the concept has become an oxymoron, Malaysians were for a while united in grief over the MH370 and MH17 disasters.  

We reached out and posted messages of hope on placards, posters and banners at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. I read the poignant messages during my transit to Sydney from Yangon.

But when it is down to competing for opportunities and getting a “fair share” of a limited economic pie, race and religion still determine where one should stand in the queue. Have the discriminatory policies and rising racial politics made us into what we are today?

A simple content analysis of social media vitriol and readers’ comments on national interest issues reported on online news portals reveals how the Malaysian mindset is fixated on racial differentiation. Whether the racialised narratives have become worse under the current administration, as claimed by some commentators, is hard to say, given the absence of reliable empirical studies.

What is clear though — from my observation — is that Malaysians are getting bolder behind the mask of anonymity in voicing their racial discontent online, much of which border on hate speech. To exacerbate matters, special interest groups and sitting members of parliaments and state assemblymen are publicly spouting their racial remarks with impunity. The government can’t pretend that all is well on the racial front. It is not. We have got to do something before our fixation on the politics of race and religion boils over and causes real problems.

What can we do? We know for a fact that prejudices are learnt from childhood. There are no other institutions as conducive as the home and school to inculcate cross-cultural literacies and global mindsets in the young generation.  

I believe the day will come — maybe not in my lifetime — when the suspicions that are driving a wedge between the races will be replaced by transformative mindsets and cultural empathy in the young generation. Digital natives who would more likely be drawn to the merits and good in each other rather than be separated by race, religion and special rights.  

This cognitive and rational capacity, however, will emerge only from within a culturally sensitive home environment, a liberal education system, cross-cultural training in the commercial and public sectors and an accepting community spirit.

Without mutual confidence and cooperation from all sectors, without the will to break away from race-based political affiliation, without the capacity to interpret issues beyond race and religion, we will have little hope of moving forward. More Tanjung Tokong-like racist graffiti will pop up when the hard times come around.

Herein lies the transformative function of the mainstream media, vernacular newspapers and especially the alternative news portals to exercise sober judgement, eschew giving prominence to extremist utterances by politically motivated sources and expose them for the backwater hicks that they are. They must avoid being led in their reportage by the right-wing mob and their malformed opinions of a dominant Malaysian cultural identity, “social contract”, religious exclusivism, special rights, and so on.

Media coverage ought to make it clear that the identity politics propagated with impunity by right-wing groups are unacceptable. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in his book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) cautioned the Hindus and Muslims in India on the illusions of identity politics: “A sense of identity can be a source not merely of pride and joy, but also of strength and confidence … And yet identity can also kill — and kill with abandon.”

Eric Loo teaches journalism at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. He worked as a journalist and taught journalism in Malaysia from the late 1970s to 1986.

This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on March 2 - 8 , 2015.

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