Thus, if one race is identified with the making of money, it will see wealth as constituting its calling in society. If another race is associated with agriculture, farming will frame the terms of its self-reference. If yet another race is associated with work on plantations, the young will consider it natural to continue the work of their forefathers there. If a certain race is identified with policing, it will want to police the system so as to ensure its privileges.
The rise of Anwar Ibrahim to the premiership of Malaysia represents a multiracial turn in its politics that is as welcome as it is historic. For once, Malaysia has an opportunity to translate the ideals of its independence from Britain into the progressive national character that should rightly belong to a country where talent in the hard sciences, the humanistic arts and the gentleness of culture cuts across ethnicity, gender and ideology.
For too long, that talent of its people has been held hostage to the colonial (and then post-colonial) phenomenon of the “plural society”, which is one where occupation matches ethnicity. Colonial and post-colonial ascriptions affect expectations because power produces the structures of meaning and the forms of knowledge that inform the sense of the self and its worth.
