LETTER | In December 2020, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah proposed - and was swiftly criticised for it - the possibility of revitalising the concept of a "Malay citizenship” that was mooted in 1947 by the coalition of the Pusat Tenaga Rakyat (Putera) and All-Malaya Council of Joint Action (AMCJA). Back then, the idea was quickly shelved once the British declared an emergency in 1948.

A few days ago, Nazir Razak proposed for the different communities in Malaysia to return to the negotiating table to review the current state of the social contract. The reasoning behind his suggestion is similar to Razaleigh’s, which is a way to solve the problems of the nation. There seems to be an understanding by a few that the way forward is to look back at how the communities in the country are managed.

I have purposely used the word community so far instead of 'race', which is the more commonly used term in the country. While most scientists today view race as a social construct, it did not begin that way. In the early 19th century, scientists such as Samuel Morton contended that humans can be categorised into different races with different levels of ability and competency. This idea of racial hierarchy informed the colonisers of the past (including the Nazis’ justification for the holocaust) and the right-wing extremists of today.

A much better term to use is ethnicity. Instead of being set in stone, ethnicity is fluid as it depends on social, cultural, religious, and linguistic characteristics, among others. Furthermore, there is a political component to ethnicity (and of course, race) whereby differences among ethnicities are reinforced by differences in political and economic structures. These differences are clearer than supposed pseudo-biological distinctions.

This is not to say that physical characteristics play no role. Scientists today, however, prefer to use the term ancestry to refer to one’s biological heritage. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is based on a person’s subjective identity. It does not mean that a person with Malay ancestry can claim to be of Chinese ethnicity on a whim; if a person looks like Malay in Malaysia, she or he is most likely to have relatively easier experiences with the authority, and that would be part of the person’s identification.

The problem with Malaysia is that we are limiting our population to three main races and others.

Under British rule, when we had our first censuses, the term 'nationalities' were used to describe ethnic identity. It was only in 1891 when 'race' was found in the appendix as part of the instruction to enumerators, and it became fully utilised in the census of 1911. In 1970, the more neutral term of 'community' was used, and then in 1980, the census shifted to 'ethnicity' (Hirschman, 1987).

Within the concept of ethnicity, before independence, the census of 1947 listed a more exhaustive list of communities within each 'race'. For example, under 'Malaysians', there are Malay proper, Aborigines, Sundanese, Javanese, Boyanese, Achenese and others, among 14 communities that were explicitly written.

But in the 1970 census, the options under Malay were reduced to eight (excluding "others"). Similarly, there were 12 options under ‘Indians’ in the 1947 census but six options in the 1970 census (excluding ‘others’).

As social beings, we are always looking to belong to a group. The more exclusive the group, the more special we feel. Therefore, it is impossible to shed our ethnic identity, and it should not be pursued by any government. Perhaps, the suggestion for us to consider by the aforementioned figures is to embrace a Malaysian identity, without abandoning our unique ancestry and social characteristics.

The fear is that if we continue to squawk on the concept of the immutable ‘race’, then we are no different than the Europeans who once colonised us to fulfil the white man’s burden of civilising supposedly inferior ethnic groups. Malaysians can, and should, be better.

SYAZA SHURI is attached to the Department of Political Science, International Islamic University Malaysia.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.