Thursday, April 06, 2006

I am a racist

I was just thinking. If you are proud of your country and dedicate yourself to it's cause, you are a nationalist. If you are proud of your femininity and fight for women's rights, you are a feminist.

So what if I'm proud of my race and purpose to further its cause? Am I a racist?

No. It seems that you are a racist if you are prejudiced against other races. But aren't we all inherently racist in some sense? Ok, Malaysians and Singaporeans will *understand* me if I throw out some stereotypes like Chinese=cunning and $$$ minded, Malays= lazy, Indians=somewhere-out-there, marginalized (for Msia, at least). I don't mean to offend people, but look: nearly everyone, from our grandmothers' generation to our generation, think that way. Heck, even Mahathir thinks that way.

So ok, I might be kinda racist when I'm in Malaysia. But perhaps when I'm here in Melbourne, I might be either an Asianist or a White-ist, depending on context. I'm Asianist when some white person asks me "Oh! You can speak English?" (me: yes, perhaps even better than you) or when some guy yells "Go back to China, you #$@%!" but I can be White-ist when I hear a fellow Asian speaking such broken English/Manglish/Singlish/whatever in tutorials that I want to hide in embarassment.

Well, 'racism' is the in thing now for the Aussie media. Everyone is talking about what it means to be Australian and immigrants should get lost if they don't like the 'liberal' values. Here's an interesting website:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,18362839-421,00.html

Face it. You're some '-ist' too.

4 comments:

_butt said...

Yes, now that you've mention it, I'm one of the '-ist' too sumtimes. I think. Haha.

But seriously, I think nobody could really escaped from being 'branded' among themselves.. simply because we're part of the society (social outcasts not included, if there's any) We're 'in' it.. in a way, it's how we reflect on ourselves too eh?

Superratty@TMY said...

i'm a mengyoe-ist
anything that works to my benefit, i like. the rest, i dont' care.

Ash said...

hmmm....
I've always believed all races of humanity are the same deep down beneath. Capable of the same good and the same evil. The same intelligence and productivity. Everything else is a consequence of culture, time and place.

So I guess, I'm humanist :P

houng said...

Yes.........I totally agree (hehe, now i don't have to blog about this anymore). I am an illogicist. You think this whole thing we call the world is logic? Phhtwwyyy!! I spit on that! More grog says I!