SOCIAL media was raging on familiar topics the past few weeks. The centre of all the attention: Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik.
Even before he was caught in the eye of the storm, a few people were smarting from the Pakatan Harapan government’s decision to maintain the quota for Bumiputras and non-Bumiputras to enter university via matriculation.
“Racist” was the almost visceral response of many non-Bumiputras.
Thus began the latest cycle in the unending debate over Malaysian-style affirmative action or positive discrimination.
An online petition called for Maszlee’s dismissal. Almost on cue, a “rival” petition appeared calling for the abolition of vernacular schools.
Left mostly unsaid in the debate is the fact that DAP, long the champion of so-called equal rights for Malaysians while in the opposition, has come around to accepting the inevitable since joining the government.
This is probably the greatest news in a long time for the nation, that a broad national political consensus has been attained on probably the most emotive issue for Malaysia and Malaysians.
What needs to be recognised by Malaysians is that affirmative-action policies are about equal rights and opportunities for all.
In its own way, DAP will now have to defend why such policies are the right ones for Malaysia and probably always have been.
It will not be easy for the party, to be sure, especially against the entrenched views of some Malaysians that such policies are unfair to them.
A “new” Malaysia, alas, still means different things to different Malaysians and the differences, depressingly enough, boil down to race and the identity politics this engenders.
It cannot mean the overturning of the system of preferences and quotas we have.
Doing so will virtually guarantee that a majority of Malaysians will, overnight, again feel that the system is stacked against them.
Amy Chua, an American law professor and writer, in one of her latest tomes, portrays how the United States has become rather like the Malaysia we have known.
“For the first time in US history,” she wrote in Political Tribes, “white Americans are faced with the prospect of becoming a minority in their ‘own country’.”
“When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism.
“Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution — but such is political tribalism.
“This leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: with nearly no one standing up… for an American identity that transcends and unites the identities of all the country’s many subgroups.”
We in Malaysia, in the throes of a political rebirth, have got what it takes to prove to ourselves as well as show to the rest of the world that we will not be forever mired in the “perilous” state Chua warns about.
This calls for the main groups in Malaysia to have greater empathy and sympathy for the views and perspectives of other groups.
Bumiputeras must know that long-entrenched privileges and special rights gnaw at non-Bumiputeras’ sense of national belonging.
Non-Bumiputeras, in particular the Chinese, on the other hand, will have to acknowledge that their reputation as a “super-achieving” group can and does generate a complex mix of admiration, envy and maybe even dread in others.
Crafting general policies that address such disparate and seemingly unbridgeable needs is never easy at the best of times. But we have arrived at a critical and promising juncture in our collective history as a nation to lay to waste the opportunities before us, and to renew and reform.
We can and indeed must start by switching off old and tired narratives about specific in-group disgruntlements and starting new ones.
A new debate over education is in so many ways key. Over it is reposed so much of our collective hopes for the future.
There is also so much we can objectively agree on.
From the status of English as a medium of instruction, an emphasis on the teaching of science and mathematics, a truly uniting national syllabus, reaching out to the disadvantaged and deserving regardless of race and, yes, any continuing role for vernacular schools in the New Malaysia.
Let’s start the ball rolling, sans all the political and emotional posturing.
The writer views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak