Happy Mother's Day and Happy May Day ! May the labours of love reign supreme.

I recall an old Malaysian radio advertisement: "May Day May Day I'm itching all over!" I suppose this is the predicament we all are in when we speak of the 'mother of all issues': culture!

Mothers give birth to babies. Babies do not know what racism means until they learn from adults. And then they become defined through institutionalised racism produced by the ideological state apparatus. The child, is the father of Man, said a sage.

Where are we at on the 50th anniversary of the national alliance?

Are we more race-conscious now than ever before? Are we really in the postmodern era in which politics of identity is taking its linguistic and semiotic turn - in which the ugliness and the beauty of race and ethnicity is surfacing and rearing their heads? Do we need a better understanding of the word 'culture'?

Cultural wars

By the growing number of race-related news-stories, letters to the editors, column writings, and opinions published by malaysiakini , we seem to be arguing more intensely on the issue of race and social dominance.

We argue on which language is more superior, whose civilisation originated first, to who this and that land belong to, or if God actually has a chosen people. We even go on a crusade and jihad based on the superiority of this and that culture and civilisation. We then hear of suicide bombings in the name of this and that culture.

We let ourselves be shaped by theories of race and ethnicity. These theories were developed by those who think that human beings are material beings primarily and that race and ethnicity are constructs that must be made real. These theories might have originated from racists themselves.

We design systems of social dominance. We build our politics, schools, cultural institutions, organisations, youth movements, and all kinds of imaginary prisons based on notions of racial superiority. We design economic policies around these notions. We distribute justice based on them. We define citizenship based on these notions. We create imagined communities out of them. We then get trapped by the attempt to redefine what race, ethnicity, and culture means.