Nari wrote:AniThyng wrote:
Going to ignore my entire paragraphs about how this is primarily a chinese issue? No Malay is going to be losing a job over cooking pork dishes.
Bumiputera affirmative action is done for the same reason it is done elsewhere, to try to enforce equity. The ethnic chinese already have considerable advantages against Malays of the same socioeconomic class.
Mea Culpa. I'll confess to not having noticed the Chinese names in the article and your post (the first I'll chalk up to jetlag, the second to the hazards of reading on my phone).
However given the existing pro-Malay framework, is it really that surprising that the majority minority (or within Penang the majority) turn around and act in a discriminatory manner themsleves when presented the opportunity? For a US reader, an analogy would be anti-gay sentiment within the black community; ironically sourced from the same place that was used to justify discrimination (albeit of different nature) against them scant decades ago.
Your other points regarding language illustrate an interesting problem. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the relevant histories to know whether this was an option, but including English in the official list appears to have worked in Singapore. In my (admittedly limited experience) few people appear to natively speak it at home, but it's what you speak at work.
That's a bit of a shame, I was hoping you were sufficiently familiar with race issues in Malaysia that we could continue discussing it. The problem I have with racial discrimination involving Chinese in a western/english framework is that a comparison with blacks won't cut it, because while black americans legitimately are economically disadvantaged, the notion that the Chinese in Malaysia are legitimately disadvantaged over the Malays in employment and opportunity is not as clear cut as the wiki article would have you believe - the NEP may have been poorly implemented and corrupt, but the reason it exists is not a fiction. I'm not even asking about looking at things like the racial composiiton of the top 10 richest men in Malaysia, just go to any middle classs neighbourhood in Malaysia and see for yourself what the racial composition is. Chinese may be a minority in the country as a whole, but they are NOT a minority in the middle-upper class, and even if we were to point out there are such people as poor chinese living from salary to salary or forced to sell pirated VCD's or become triad members, that doesn't really say much for the vastly more poor malays in teh same situation.
The official language of business in Malaysia is english, no question about it (unless your company is a SME that does a lot of business with China/Taiwan, but even then in my experience actual written stuff is still in english) , but what people use to write emails and documents and what people use in conversation are two different things.
One thing Singapore did different from Malaysia is that in Singapore, there is only one school system:
English Medium, Mandarin/Malay/Tamil as compulsary second language
Malaysia has 2 official government school systems:
Malay Medium, English Compulsory, Mandarin/Tamil an elective if the school has the resources and students to do so
OR
Mandarin Medium/Tamil Medium, English Compulsory, Malay Compulsory.
I don't think a analogous situation really exists anywhere else - I would wonder about say, Switzerland, but in Switzerland the language divide is geographical.
It's not quite so in Malaysia.
