Dangerous marriage of urban poverty and racism in Malaysia

On Saturday evening, police were called up to make their rounds at the Low Yat Plaza area after receiving rumours of fresh violence. Thankfully, all was clear and Malaysians were spared more bad news to wake up to on a Sunday morning.

The violence that erupted in the heart of Kuala Lumpur city last week shocked many, and has recast an uncomfortable light on Malaysia’s fragile state of race relations.

The Low Yat incident certainly did not start out as a racial issue, and although harbingers of doom may like to paint it as so, is not an indication of another May 13 riot between the Malays and ethnic Chinese.

On the other hand, the Low Yat incident is also more than just a simple issue of thugs and thievery and in spite of how much the moderates want to believe it was, is far from being a mere isolated incident.

The underlying cause for this outbreak of violence between a gang of Malays and a group of ethnic Chinese, is an increasing sense of discontentment among the urban poor, the majority of whom are the Bumiputeras.

In the country’s developmental boom of the 1990’s, large segments of society were left behind, creating a widening economic gap in the city.

Official government statistics show that urban poverty in Malaysia has been trimmed down to an almost negligible 2%, although many community groups have challenged the figures, claiming that the parameters for defining poverty need to be changed to better reflect today’s high cost of living.

The fact is that the poor are feeling the pinch with the rocketing prices of essential goods, even as wages have largely remained the same over the past decade.

The unemployment rate among the young has also been rising, with almost half of all local graduates unable to find jobs after six months of leaving school. The majority of this number of unemployed are also from the Malay community.

While the link between poverty and crime is a time-tested fact, this same lethal combination of desperation, ignorance and frustration have made the affected young generation of Malays ripe targets for extremist racist views.

Young Malays were sold on the idea that Malaysia’s vast wealth was for their taking with assistance from the government, but the hard reality is that this abundance has been reaped by only the elite few.

The truth is that the government’s race-based economic policies aimed at helping the Malay community out of poverty, have failed them.

Today, too large a number of Malay youths are left languishing with the inability to speak or write English coherently, thus making them unqualified candidates for decent jobs. Many are unable to compete with others within Malaysia, much less the rest of the world.

And within this pool of people who are disenfranchised by the great divide between reality and their promised success, vulnerable and desperate minds have become dangerous playgrounds for racism and bigotry.

This is precisely what happened in Low Yat Plaza, and also what caused the protest of a cross at a church in Taman Medan several months ago. And, unfortunately, it will also be the reason for more such incidents in the future.

When you have not been properly educated to appreciate and understand the racial balance in our country, profiling and stereotyping will always play a big role in making other races a convenient scapegoat to blame for one’s own poverty.

While I agree that lack of education and poverty cannot be used solely as an excuse for their actions and each must be made to be accountable for their deeds, I wonder if society can really expect any different.

We are, after all, children of racist policies.

Perhaps it shouldn’t alarm us that with the aggravating forces of poverty and distrust, the most vulnerable within our society, too, have become racists. – July 19, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.