EASING racial and religious tensions is next on the prime minister’s agenda before he calls it a day. What are the issues that seem to hinder such noble thoughts?
Multi-racial identification in our country is still drawn along racial lines. Ours is a society with wide chasms across racial lines in everything we do from schools to places of work.
After nearly 50 years of independence, while some of those chasms may appear closed, others have persisted and even widened alarmingly. Too many people, even those who are well meaning, have a talent for making history far worse than it was.
All this classification on the basis of race has to do with certain people’s mindset that there is a privileged class and none should question that. They must be questioned and challenged with a vocabulary that does not support their logic.
Fanatical insistence on dichotomising humanity into social races is anachronistic in today’s borderless world.
Expansion of opportunities have often coincided with continuing inequality. It is not enough to open the gates of opportunity; everyone should be given the opportunity to walk through those gates.
While not claiming to be an expert in sociology, what I do understand is that there is a big difference between an ethnic group and an entire nation.
I believe that the only way these barriers can be broken down is by recognising that there are other ethnic groups in this country who refuse to be categorised by the simple terms of non-this and non-that. Dismantle the social, personal and psychological barriers that keep the races apart. Only then we will be a nation in which ethnicity would be incidental, not fundamental; descriptive, not defining.
Noel F. D’Oliveiro
23/12/08
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