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| Protesters support Malaysia's racist Bumiputra policies, Kuala Lumpur, December 8. |
Legalised racism is permitted in places as widely apart as the United States and Malaysia. In the US it's called Affirmative Action. In Malaysia it's called the Bumiputra policy. In both cases the aim is specifically racial, that is to say, racist: to provide benefits to one or more race over others. In the States it's mainly for Black and Hispanic minorities being treated preferentially over the White majority and the Asian minority. In Malaysia it's to benefit the Malay majority over the Chinese minority.
Since it seems to be ok by everyone to have specifically race-based policies, I presume it's ok also to make some race-based observations. (It would probably be better to talk of "ethnically based" instead of "race", since there are some views that race is purely a social construct, but I'm using common parlance here).
My observations are mainly about the Chinese. The article linked below notes that the Chinese in Malaysia came there as common labourers in the mid sixties. Yet they still did well enough to prompt the government to hold them back. To handicap them. Similarly in the States, Chinese immigrants came to labour on the railways in the 19th century. Again they've done so well since that Harvard, to take just one example, is being sued for making it harder for them than any other group to join. They're too successful! Or as Harvard puts it, they don't have the right "personality".… hmmm…
The common explanation for the success of Chinese whenever they go, and however poor to begin with, an explanation which — married as I am to a Chinese, and having been involved with China for over forty years — I agree with, is that their culture places huge emphasis on hard work and education. (Jews the same, btw) (and phew! what a sentence).
By contrast, at least in the United States, African-American culture is something of the opposite. Scott Adams talks of "cultural gravity", pulling down would-be high achievers in the African-American community. Whereas Chinese culture is not gravity, but something like a hot air balloon, encouraging and celebrating high fliers.
I recall a story about a college graduation prize-giving in America. Whenever an African American student was awarded a prize their black class mates didn't clap.…. They booed! Imagine how dispiriting that must be!
Another thing pointing to culture in this whole race thing: Nigerians who migrate to America perform better than native-born African-Americans. Having been brought up in a highly competitive Nigerian culture, they thrive in the freedom of the United States. And they do so without Affirmative Action. General Colin Powell is one such example Mrs BoT tells me.
It's not just me, a cranky old white man, saying this. Black Americans say so too: the likes of talk show host Larry Elder and economics professor Thomas Sowell. Even Obama had a bit of a go at it: it's ok to "talk white"!
The point being this: that much more attention needs to be paid to how to overcome the negative "cultural gravity" of the African-American and Hispanic-American cultures. Otherwise no amount of Affirmative Action is going to help. (As indeed it has not helped since its inception in the seventies — see the article).
The same goes for Malaysia and its racist Bumiputra policies.
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