I've been off Twitter for the past several days because of work so I haven't been privy to the Malaysian discourse on the BLM protests.

My expectations were low, but I log back in and Jesus Christ...

We went from "What about migrants?" to "Meleis is a racial slur" to "Malays are NOT the white people of Malaysia!".

We're really something lah...

1) Concerning the welfare of migrants and refugees.

Yes, you would be correct to point out the hypocrisy of those who simply jumped on the bandwagon of BLM as way of assuming illusory moral high ground against the US when they've been silent on the mass incarceration and endangerment of undocumented people in detention centers.

However, read the room.

The issue at hand is "anti-blackness", which demands its own reckoning on its own terms.

If you'd like to bring migrants and refugees into the conversation, try and at least talk about the intersection between the targeted discrimination against darker-skinned locals and foreigners.

Whataboutism for the sake of it should be nobody's standard of discourse because worthy causes don't deserve to be treated as cheap devices to bring a hypocrite down a peg unless you have something equally substantial to say regarding the issue at hand.

2) "Melei is a racial slur"

How many times do we have to repeat ourselves?

The derogatory harm behind racial slurs is determined by history,. Not "hurt feelings". Otherwise ANY given word could be a slur.

The word was coined by a Malay blogger to refer to racist Malays and has no racial or class connotations attached to it.

Ffs, how do you even use it in real life? Stop trying to draw a false equivalence between racism and prejudice.

3) "Malays are NOT the white people of Malaysia!"

Ok. I need y'all to stay with me here because I have some choice words for you.

The talk around this phrase is what really took me aback because of the way liberals n leftists defensively reacted to it as tho it were a precise historical comparison rather than an angry sentiment pointing towards the larger, more relevant scope of Ketuanan Melayu oppression.

Yes. The Malays do not share an identical history with oppressive white colonists n segregationists, but then again, the US is strictly speaking not an ethnocidal police state either.

Both these analogies don't hold up to objective scrutiny, but that's never been the point.

The rhetoric is an accepted device to amplify resentment against institutionalized racism more keenly felt by minorities and underscore the blind spots that exist even in progressive Malay lenses.

I would've thought liberals and leftists would've understood this fundamental point about the language of punching up, but apparently a lot of you were more offended that you were compared to European colonizers and made light of the fact >

< that all our forefathers were the victims of colonization.

Again, that's true. You know what else is though?

The fact that the British colonizers are gone, but the legacy of the divisive framework they used to exploit our labor, coerce our collaboration and cement socioeconomic divisions among our communities has been co-opted under the banner of Ketuanan Melayu.

Our Federal Constitution contains immutable ethnocentric provisions designed to protect the "special position" of Bumiputeras. While you could argue its intention was to establish a more equitable order in post-colonial inequity, that doesn't change its place in the dominant >

< Malay nationalist narrative that non-Malays are and will forever more just be "pendatang" whose presence was enforced on them by the British.

I know you all understand this. I know you all are as ardent opponents of Ketuanan Melayu as I am, but >

< you need to understand that "solidarity" against the legacy of colonialism will never be complete if we're just yelling at history books and not allowing space for anger to be vented against a Malay-controlled status quo.

I don't think it should be the place of privileged stakeholders in the sociopolitics of Malaysia's explicit racial hierarchy to control the terms of outrage

It didn't escape me that the liberals n leftists protesting against the Malays/Whites comparison were in fact mostly Malay

Don't forget that Malay nationalism predated Europeans and endured well after them. They didn't invent it. They molded it.

It wasn't a utopia before they came.

"Using the term 'Melei' or comparing Malays to Whites isn't useful though"

Well that depends on who's using it and what for, doesn't it? Using the term "Karen" doesn't garner anything politically "useful" either, but it is an effective pejorative for the racism of white women against black men.

Investigate the context of that anger and you'll find that much of it doesn't occur in a vacuum, and that it can be quelled if you refocus our gaze on the structural racism it points to.