House owner’s refusal to rent to other races not sign of disharmony, says expert

GEORGE TOWN: An expert in ethnic relations said today recent news of landlords wanting to rent out their properties to a certain race is not an indicator of the country’s social harmony.

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Institute of Ethnic Studies deputy director Kartini Aboo Talib Khalid said such cases were “hiccups” and it was not something that occurred in the life of an average Malaysian.

Speaking to FMT, she said Malaysia experienced a form of “stable tensions”, where its citizens did not take the path of violence in reaction to any disruption of social harmony.

Kartini said, instead, Malaysians would lament about incidents on social media and in coffee shops and life would go on as usual right after.

She said while all property owners have the democratic right to let their property to a tenant they liked, the same democratic principle also must protect the rights of those discriminated or deprived of their basic human rights.

Kartini said the problem of those facing such hardships should be looked into by a government mediation commission or an agency specialising in “ethnic or cultural misunderstanding”, which she said should be headed by cultural experts.

Kartini Aboo Talib Khalid.

“Social hiccups such as these (racist landlords) only appear in certain junctures, it is not something you see every day.

“But what needs to be understood is our country’s concept of togetherness has been cohesion, rather than unity, hence, we face a few issues known as stable tensions,” she said.

Kartini described stable tensions as a form of social deficit which included religion, language, ethnicity, inter-generational gaps, gender, class and economy.

“These are indicators that often become the issues that trigger a disruption in our social harmony,” she said.

Kartini said to fix this problem, changes were needed in family upbringing, education, positive media images, reports and social campaigns to bridge the existing gap between races.

Universiti Sains Malaysia’s Sivamurugan Pandian feels as the country becomes more developed and educated, its citizens will naturally be more accepting of each other.

He said what had happened was an indication of the communities facing an identity crisis as humans.

Sivamurugan said the root cause of the problem was the generalisation of their experience with a particular race and later using prejudices from that experience to members of that race.

He said this had led to a phenomenon where one could be ethnocentric and feel “nothing wrong” about it.

“This is racism, when they feel more superior than others,” the professor in political sociology said when contacted.

They were asked to comment on two recent cases where people looking to rent houses or rooms were turned away because they were not of the same race as the house owners. - FMT