ABSTRACT
There has been a growing awareness, and concern in Malaysia about the nature of social interactions between people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds and the way they contradict popular images. Projecting positive, harmonious, and hopeful interracial relations has become such a major part of public discourse that when some Malaysians are confronted with representations of these social relations that contradict this hopeful image they express a sense of denial. For instance, an academic recently conducted a survey on racial interaction among students at University Malaya and found that the overwhelming majority of Malays, Chinese, and Indians did not interact socially, a condition she and newspaper journalists interpreted as “racial polarisation” (The Sun Oct. 14,1999). Some university officials disputed the validity of her findings and characterized the condition as a “lack of active interaction among students” rather than “racial polarisation” (The Sun Oct. 14, 1999; The Sun Oct. 16, 1999). Nevertheless, they organized “goodwill speeches” in which students were given the opportunity to speak about the positive attributes of other races and implemented a policy of making students from different races share dormitory rooms. Similarly, a resident of a suburb of Kuala Lumpur wrote a letter to the editor that suggested that the newspaper might have committed a “great injustice to local varsities and students by concluding that polarisation has reached an alarming level” (The Sun Oct. 15, 1999). The writer of this letter argued that the academic survey was unrepresentative, and that significant informal interracial interactions do exist and that where they do not exist one must not conclude that there is enmity or tension between the students. It is a “purely individual” choice to stick among your own “‘kind.’” In this letter, the writer wrote:
I am a product of a local university and I am proud to say I had good relations with students of all races and from all states and I cannot be alone in stating this as it has to be reciprocal on the part of my friends. How do you explain students from various ethnic groups having meals together, “hanging out” in each other’s [sic] rooms and having group discussions?
