I refer to the letter Corporate villains come from all races . I too am fed up and disgusted about stereotyping an individual's crime or shortcomings with his race. We see racism in every aspect of life in Malaysia. I won't go into detail as numerous incidents have been highlighted often enough in various fora.

But when writers who on the surface champion good governance, racial equality and good values go astray and don't realise it despite being rebuked, all seems to be lost..

I am referring to Jeff Ooi's Screenshots weblog topic Abetting Astro Thugs where the subject was about the rise in Astro's subscription rate of Astro. This writer found it apt to bring in racial background when there was absolutely no reason to.

He writes: 'But you have to salute the Indian-Malaysian who knows how to dip his fingers into the pockets of his Chinese and Malay brethren on a recurring basis.' (The Indian-Malaysian referred to here is the owner of the public-listed company).

He later goes on to give the a racial breakdown of the household penetration rates, the number of subscribers and average monthly subscriptions all which show Chinese contributing to about half the total amount to Astro's coffers.

No crime done here as this sort of data is vital for a company's marketing strategy and other business reasons. If anybody is unable to see the bigotry in the manner part of the article was written, allow me to point them out.

Firstly, why refer to the person by his race, when race doesn't come into the issue at all? And why then proceed to imply that the other races (Chinese and Malays) are being 'robbed' by this person of another race (Indian)?

And secondly, why follow up by giving a racial breakdown which shows one race (the Chinese) contributing more to this 'Indian-owned' company? Racism can clearly be perceived the way the writer has written his piece.

Despite being ticked off by a small number of his readers (including me) on the racial slur that he made, he instead belittled them by calling us ignorant and hypocrites. He justified his action by saying that all forms filled by Malaysians had a blank for 'Race" and as such he has done nothing wrong.

He further said the racial breakdown were provided the company concerned and is also available from the newspapers. Well, I'm sure company reports and newspapers don't 'entertain' you with a racial slur before they provide you with race-based statistics.

Please, we should not encourage this sort of racist writings.