First, let’s acknowledge that racial categories as they operate in Malaysia today are a relatively recent colonial construct. Once upon a time, these categories were much more fluid and context-dependent. But others have covered that history elsewhere, and this essay is about how to have conversations in the world we currently inhabit.

So: the ladder. Every nation has its ladder. What’s ours? Often, it’s this one:

That is the ladder our government props up, the ladder of politics, public life, public education, government funding. But that’s not the only ladder in Malaysia, and here’s where it gets complicated. This is the ladder of economic power, the private sector ladder:

You will have noticed two things about these ladders: 1) no matter which one is in use, Indians and Orang Asli are never at the top; 2) just like our government, I don’t know what to do with the Lain-lain. But this isn’t because I don’t see them as an important part of Malaysia’s story; it’s only because their place on that ladder is variable. For the purposes of this primer, because I don’t tick the Lain-lain box on official forms, I’ve decided it’s not my place to speak for the Others. This is only the beginning of a conversation I hope will evolve off this page, and I hope insiders of the Eurasian and other Other communities will steer that conversation. I plan to hold my tongue and listen to them, as I’m asking the rest of you to do right now.

Already, I know, you are questioning the ladder. You’re saying, but some of the richest men in Malaysia are Indian; and race doesn’t matter as much as money and class; and what about all those Indian doctors and lawyers? Don’t tell me a Malay FELDA settler has more privilege than them!

But I’m here to talk about racial privilege, and that’s not how the ladder of racial privilege works. Your place on the ladder is what you carry with you despite your financial and class privilege. It is written on your body. It is indelible. It operates when you are a stranger, when nobody knows who your family is or where you went to school. The ladder means that when three people walk into a room — a Malay, a Chinese and an Indian — very different assumptions are made about each of those people based on their race, before anyone can gauge their finances or their class, before they open their mouths.

Of course, as I already said, so much depends on where the room is. Is the room in a government department, or is it the interview room of a Chinese firm? Is it an affluent millennial gathering in Bangsar, at which the ladder may be temporarily shoved into a corner, covered with a dustcloth, and forgotten for a few hours? The specifics are different in these different cases. But one thing is constant for dark-skinned Indians: whoever is on top, we are always on the bottom rung. We know there are two ladders, but we experience them as almost identical. For many of us, distinguishing between them becomes a theoretical exercise for which we don’t have the time or the energy. We think of it as The Ladder, the unifying, all-encompassing law of Malaysia, according to which neither institutionalised racial privilege in government-controlled spaces nor systemic social and cultural privilege favour us.

The ladder means that there are scholarship offers and job offers that say “Bumiputera candidates preferred” or “Chinese preferred”. There are for rent signs that say “CHINESE ONLY”, but there are no signs just for you. The ladder means that no one of your race will ever lead the country — which is also true for the Chinese — but also that you are unlikely to work in a company that tacitly refuses to hire any race except your own (which is not true for the Chinese). The ladder means it is understood that regardless of education level, people of your race will always be last in line for top government posts and promotions, university chairs, and all positions that confer power and visibility in the nation state. But it also means that you cannot shrug off these inequities, secure in the knowledge that your people own the private sector. When one person of your race holds a high government position or becomes a CEO, this will be held up as evidence that there is no ladder.

The point no one will address is that it is not necessary to hold up Malay or Chinese success stories to demonstrate anything. The ladder means that when people debate the New Economic Policy and other socio-economic policies that have followed it, they talk about Malay equity and Chinese equity. When you remind them that affirmative action based on race has completely failed the Indian poor, they will shrug and say, well, no system is perfect. The ladder means that both the apparatus of the nation state and the apparatus of capitalism run rough-shod over your festivals, scheduling government exams for the day after Deepavali, decorating the malls for Christmas right after Halloween even though Halloween is not a Malaysian holiday and Deepavali falls in between the two. The ladder means that although disproportionate numbers of your young men die from police brutality in custody, other Malaysians do not think police brutality is a problem in our country. The ladder means that when you sit down in the dentist’s chair for your routine dental check-up, the hygienist tells you, before you open your mouth to show your perfect teeth: “You Indians always have very poor dental hygiene.” The ladder means that when you go to the sundry shop with your father, a shop he has been frequenting for ten years, and realise you are just a little bit short on cash to pay the bill because your father added an extra packet of biscuits to his basket at the last minute, the shop owner scowls at you and says, “Sorry, no hutang”. Yet as soon as your white husband shows up with the ten ringgit you are missing, the same shop owner, beaming, piles free gifts into your basket. The ladder means that you grow up never seeing yourself represented on screen or in advertising of any kind, which, is, yes, only a practical capitalist consideration — there are so few of you, you are not the target audience, you are not the ones buying — but what do you know of capitalism and market research when you are eight years old? You know only that you never see yourself, except as comic relief, the fat black man in the Malay movie, the unintelligible head waggler in the school play.

Here’s where, if you are Malay or Chinese, you might be thinking “all Malaysians are racist,” and “I’ve suffered discrimination too.” Maybe, if you’re Malay, you’ve had Chinese or Indians assume you’re lazy. Maybe if you’re Chinese, you’ve had Malays or Indians assume you’re greedy. In fact — there’s no “maybe” there. You have. It’s impossible for you not to have, in our country. But here’s the difference between being Malay or Chinese and being Indian: if you are Malay or Chinese, there are times when you occupy that top rung on the ladder. There are spaces out in the world beyond your home that you control, spaces where you get to exert your power. I’m not talking about the power you exert as a result of acquired wealth or class privilege. Please don’t tell me that Ananda Krishnan exerts plenty of power. I am talking about the power you exert as an ordinary, anonymous citizen, purely as a benefit of your physical appearance.

The point is that you get your turn to exercise this power, however you choose to do so, whether you use it for the greater good or not. Yes, some of us have the power of education, money or class, in addition to or despite our place on that ladder. These things can mitigate the effects of being perpetually on the bottom rung, but they cannot cancel them out permanently or in every situation. So if you’re Malay, and you interview at a Chinese company but don’t get the job because of bias against Malays: yes, that’s painful, but you get to leave that office and see your racial identity respected, celebrated, affirmed. You can count on your visibility in the public space, but you don’t even need to reassure yourself that you can count on it; you don’t know any different. You take it for granted, without having to name it, without having to understand what visibility is. You know that the national narrative — the official story of Malaysia — honours your racial identity and positions you at its centre. You know that if your children attend a government school, they will see their race, their culture and their religion centred in their school books, prioritised both in the classroom and outside it. You know that there are academic institutions open only to children of your race, that the price of a house is lower for you and your fellow Malays, that university quotas favour your race.

If, on the other hand, you are Chinese, and you grow up knowing that you might score straight As in your SPM exam and yet be denied a university place in the field of your choice: yes, that’s painful, but you know that Chinese companies will favour you over other candidates. You know that your chances of finding a job in an office where every single employee is Chinese, where the office parties are a sea of Chinese faces, are high, should you want such a job. You know you won’t have a problem finding a house to rent or obtaining a bank loan. You know that the rental agent won’t tell you, after asking your name, “Sorry ah, Miss, Chinese cannot lah.” You know that you can open any magazine, look at any billboard or turn on the television to see your racial type held up as the ideal. You, too, can count on your visibility without ever naming it.

In 1989, Peggy McIntosh published a groundbreaking essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. It was written, of course, for the North American context; it cannot be imposed as is on any Malaysian ethnicity. But if you are Malay or Chinese in peninsular Malaysia, you can go down McIntosh’s racial privilege checklist, and you can divide that list between you. Some of it applies to Malays; some of it applies to Chinese; some of it applies to both. None of it applies to dark-skinned Indians in a racially diverse context in Malaysia. When there are Malays and Chinese in the room or the office or the restaurant or the shopping mall or the neighbourhood, not one of McIntosh’s conditions of privilege applies to dark-skinned Indians.

This is why, if you are a Malay or Chinese person in conversation with an Indian person in Malaysia, you cannot claim to have “also experienced racism”. You cannot put yourself on the same rung of that ladder. You cannot talk about reverse racism, because systemic racism in Malaysia never puts dark-skinned Indians in a position of relative power. It’s not that Indians do not discriminate against other races. It’s not that Indians are incapable of bias and bigotry, even virulent bigotry. This is a group I can speak for, because I am an insider, and I know what we say to each other when no outsiders are listening. The only thing straight about a Chinaman is his hair. The Malays only know how to eat and sleep. I know. But in an unequal balance of power, prejudice is not the same thing as systemic racism. No one has expressed this truth better than Jamaica Kincaid did in “On Seeing England for the First Time”:

I may be capable of prejudice, but my prejudices have no weight to them, my prejudices have no force behind them, my prejudices remain opinions, my prejudices remain my personal opinion. […] The people I come from are powerless to do evil on a grand scale.

This is also why, if you are a Malay or Chinese person who leaves Malaysia temporarily or permanently and experiences white privilege in a white majority country, you still cannot say you now have the same understanding of racism as a dark-skinned Malaysian Indian does. What you have experienced is the difference between your position on the ladder in your home country and your new position in a white majority country. What you have experienced is your relative lack of power in your new surroundings: a net loss, for you. I don’t deny that that change is destabilising, even traumatic. I don’t deny that you have now experienced racism from which you cannot seek refuge in the spaces in which you hold the power. But for a dark-skinned Malaysian Indian, the comparison is different from the outset, since we never belong to the dominant majority in any multiracial context in Malaysia or outside it. The shock of experiencing systemic racism for the first time therefore does not put you in a position of authority on the matter of racism. You may bring your stories to us, breathless, aghast, and we may well sympathise, but you cannot expect our sympathy. You cannot require it. You cannot blame us for thinking, where were you when worse things were happening to us in Malaysia? When you were given the prize or the scholarship or the promotion even though someone else had better grades or was more qualified, did you say anything? When you were chosen to represent the country overseas because the best player on the team was a non-Malay, did you refuse? When your relatives warned a child that the Indian man would come and catch her if she didn’t behave better, did you reprimand them clearly enough for the Indian man to hear you?

When you compare racism in white majority countries and racism in Malaysia, and Malaysia comes out looking better in your comparison than any white majority country in which you’ve lived, it’s because you have privilege in Malaysia. When a dark-skinned Indian compares white racism and systemic racism in Malaysia, and tells you that neither system comes out better in this terrible contest because there is no net loss for us, there is only a difference of detail, of nose and bouquet: it is not your place to disagree. No, not only is it not your place, it is absurd, because you are denying an experience that is literally impossible for you to have.

So where do we go from here? If you’ve read this far, and if you’re still following me along this path: what next? Wasn’t this essay supposed to be about how to talk about racism, not just how not to talk about it? Well, the how to part is very simple. There’s really only one rule, and it’s this: remember the ladder. In every multiracial context, think of where you are on that ladder. Once you’ve figured that out, follow this simple rule: ask those above you on the ladder to listen to you, and listen to those below you.

Wait, you’re protesting, does this mean Malays and Chinese can never speak to Indians about race? Of course it doesn’t. The rule is a simplification, and real conversations, hard conversations, are never simple. They never follow neat pathways we’ve laid out for them. They never respect rules. Once you’ve internalised it — because it’s a feeling, really, this rule, an awareness of power in all situations — you can follow the spirit of it, rather than the letter. Clear a metaphorical space for those below you on the ladder to speak frankly, even bluntly. Use your power to make sure their voices are heard, and not just when they have the capacity to be polite. Pay attention. Notice when it’s time for you to stop talking and start listening. Do not insist upon an equal share of airtime, invoking context-devoid, supposedly neutral notions such as the “two-way street” you think listening should be: recognise that your race has historically controlled and dominated the narrative, whether through the government apparatus of the mainstream media and the national education system, or through the apparatus of capitalism. You have had decades to tell your own stories to the exclusion of ours. You have had the entire nation as your captive audience.

The progressive movement in the United States coined this mantra: when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. But I would go further than that, because the truth is, we are not talking about equality. When you are used to privilege, even one step towards equality feels like oppression. Your instincts might tell you to rush to correct or silence us when we tell our stories, as though the minute one of us speaks the playing field becomes magically equal, and you deserve an equal share of the fraction of airtime we’ve wrested for ourselves. Resist those instincts. Do not deny the subjective experiences of those below you on the ladder.

Do not derail conversations that are not about you, do not centre yourself, do not immediately jump to your own defence when what is being criticised is the system. Do not prioritise your own fragility over the conversation. When several people are agreeing with each other about their experience of the ladder, do not conclude that they are only agreeing in order to bully you. Conversely, do not produce your examples of people below you on the ladder who agree with your take on race. Every structurally unequal system produces minority voices who uphold the structure; this is part of how power works in unequal societies. Tamil voices who uphold racial inequality in Malaysia are first of all rare, but must also be understood as part of Malaysia’s history of forcing oppressed and overlooked people into games of expedience.

A discussion of structural inequality is not a personal attack on anyone. You may disagree with their points. You may feel uncomfortable. You may even feel threatened. You may have to experience keeping your discomfort to yourself, something those below you on the ladder do on a daily basis. And finally: do not tell your children that “race doesn’t matter,” and that “everyone is the same regardless of the colour of their skin”. These are platitudes that achieve nothing other than alleviating your discomfort and sweeping the real conversation under the carpet. Tell your children about the ladder. Tell them how a person’s life is shaped by their place on the ladder, which is not the same thing is saying that people have zero control over their destiny, or that personal responsibility doesn’t matter. It is only acknowledging that where you begin in life, and what your body looks like, do make a difference. There are abundant resources out there for white parents ready to talk about race to their children; none of them applies exactly to the Malaysian context, but all of them can be modified or used as a foundation. You only have to be willing to take the initiative.

None of this is easy. But there’s much to be gained if we learn to talk about race rather than talking around it, if we learn to push through scary conversations on sensitive topics rather than retreating to our conversational safe havens. Like all of you, I love talking about Malaysian food; I just don’t think it should be the only thing that unites us, the only thing we feel comfortable talking about in a multiracial group. This year will mark the sixty-third anniversary of our independence from the British. It’s time we learned to talk about the one colonial legacy that has haunted us longer than any other. It’s time we talked about the divisions that have defined our nation and shaped our individual and collective lives for generations, rather than pretending they don’t matter.

This essay draws extensively upon the ideas of Peggy McIntosh and Robin DiAngelo, reimagined for the West Malaysian context

• Tags: Free to read, Malaysia, Preeta Samarasan