By Haris Ibrahim
I received an e-mail from a lady teacher. She attached the two-paged document that I have reproduced below.
This is what she said in her mail :
“After all the talk of 1Malaysia, we are still asked to mark ourselves as Malay or non-Malay, bumi or non-bumi, Muslim or non-Muslim.
Does my race or religion have any relevance whether I am a good teacher?
Are we not all Malaysians?
I hate this, Haris.
Can I just ignore those irritating questions?
What should I do?”
I replied her :
“Take a red pen and a ruler. Draw a line right through ‘Status Bumiputra’, ‘Bangsa’, ‘Etnik’ and ‘Agama’ and then write over that line you have just drawn, “TIDAK RELEVAN. SAYA ANAK BANGSA MALAYSIA”.
If you do not agree with this sort of profiling, condemn it by refusing to go along with it.
The reason this sort of profiling still goes on is because even as we recognise how wrong it is, we take the easy way out and comply.
In reality, it is we who give life to this profiling.
If we collectively refuse to legitimise thiss policy of profiling by refusing to comply, it will one day surely go away.”
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I’m going to reproduce below parts of an earlier posting.
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RPK, almost tongue-in-cheek, offered a simple definition of ‘civil disobedience’ in a POST at MT sometime back :
“It’s actually quite simple. You defy the powers-that-be, but you do it in a passive, not active, manner. You do not resist. You just do nothing. And is this not what Malaysians are good at, doing nothing?”
Of late, notwithstanding the PM’s talk about 1Malaysia, we still see a lot of racist, divide-and-rule crap coming out from Utusan, which is an UMNO mouthpiece, from the DPM, from other ministers and a whole array of NGOs which, if you bothered to check, again lead back to UMNO.
UMNO continues to play the race card because this is the only politics they understand.
The other BN component parties, most times, don’t have the courage to stand up to UMNO and say ‘Cut out this race crap. We are all Malaysians, so stop this divide-and-rule game’.
In response to UMNO’s ketuanan Melayu, Pakatan Rakyat has been heard to espouse ketuanan rakyat but, sadly, sometimes even the PR politicians appear afraid to walk the full distance needed to truly see this nation on the way to being that of a single people.
For some time now, I’ve believed that if we are to see the aspiration of ‘One People, One Nation’ become a reality, it has to be people-driven.
What say we start a little civil disobedience now to send out our own little message, in our own little way, to the government , that we are no longer going to countenance their divide-and-rule tactics?
We could simply call this initiative Project Irrelevant.
Project Irrelevant is not new.
It was launched at the first Bangsa Malaysia Merdeka forum and get-together on 25th August, 2007 at the then Blog House. You can read about that HERE.
I’ve also written about Project Irrelevant HERE.
Let me just reproduce my closing lines in the Project Irrelevant post :
“If you are one of those who has written with comments to this blog supportive of the many initiatives to one day see this as a nation of one people, I ask you to now support this initiative.
Please walk your talk.
If you proclaim yourself as anak Bangsa Malaysia in cyberspace, have the courage and conviction to do the same on paper.
SEX : IRRELEVANT
RELIGION : IRRELEVANT
RACE : BANGSA MALAYSIA”
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