Blame the liberal education and permissive environment in Britain and, to a lesser extent, Germany, which nurtured my academic and spiritual growth, but I have since come to terms with the fact that race as a concept is largely socio-politically constructed rather than biologically determined.

I once met an Ulster student who was a devout Unionist. I challenged him with the question of the province's future, and he defended vehemently the right of the Protestants to remain in the United Kingdom. Fair enough. When we met again years later, he told me he just found to his horror that his great grandfather had been a Gaelic-speaking Catholic, who converted to the Church of England and was rewarded with land and property.

Such scenarios are, needless to say, nothing new in Malaysia. Anyone can tell of someone's conversion to Islam that eventually led to the "bumiputra" status and all the perks that came with it.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad, for one, is a descendent of an Indian Muslim teacher. Throughout his political life, he made a conscious effort to shield this "embarrassing" fact from the electorate, burying his head in the sand and pretending that the whole world was not in the know. Worse, he even sought to build up his "Malay credentials" at the expense of national unity in the early years of his political venture.

And I perhaps should celebrate the fact that Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's maternal grandfather was a Hui Hui Muslim from Hainan Island, making him my "fellow Hainanese"!

I have also seen a few cases in which the children of Chinese Muslim converts are virtually no different from the average Malay kid save perhaps their fairer skin and narrow eyes that sometimes "betray" them. Don't get me wrong, I actually felt perfectly fine when they identified themselves as Malay and spoke no Chinese, and was glad that they seemed well accepted by other friendly, darker skinned Malay kids.

All this only goes to prove that racial identity is plastic and malleable, and can be easily changed within even two generations.

Losing 'racial purity'

Still, a story that I heard recently continues to sadden me. A Chinese mother, married to a Malay civil servant, took the trouble to remind her seven-year-old daughter not to behave "too Chinese" on the first day of school. She meant well, as she only wanted her daughter to "fit in" in a predominantly Malay environment. But I suspect the Chinese mother's deliberateness was partly, if not fully, informed by years of racial indoctrination under the Umno-led Barisan Nasional government.

Not that I hold dear to my Chinese identity a constructed self no doubt. Just that I found it unfathomable that even a young mother, for all her political innocence, is entrapped in the obnoxious race ideology sanctioned by the highest echelon of the ruling party.

And I shall make no excuse for the Chinese who are equally paranoid about losing "racial purity" and frown upon a person of mixed parentage. I have witnessed too many of them in my relatively young life.

To be fair, it would be farfetched to compare Malaysia to Burma, a country where administration as well as nationality and citizenship law is based overwhelmingly on the concept of race: Burman, Karen, Chin, Shan etc, while ignoring the rich history of racial integration and heterogeneous sub-nationalities within each group.

Yet, it would be dangerously nave for Malaysians to not face up to the reality that our country has become so racialised over the years that more and more non-Malays, and even some Malays, have begun to question if it is worthwhile to stay on and fight a good fight.

Professor Shamsul Amri Baharuddin of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, in a recent interview by the Sun newspaper, dismissed the significance of the Kampung Medan incident in 2001, and justified its omission from the revised but still controversial Ethnic Relations Module by saying that the clash did not reach the level of May 13.

To complete his ignorance, the professor told the journalist that there was racism in the developed world too. Toned with sarcasm, he cited the Jade vs Shilpa dispute in Britain.

I wonder if the professor was aware of the beeline of politicians who came out in support of Shilpa - so much so that I found it rather overdone - or the fact that both Buckingham Palace and the House of Commons later hosted the Bollywood star in order to make amends.

Even the rightwing conservative party cannot afford to be mired in a race row, and David Cameron's swift action in sacking a shadow cabinet colleague for racial gaffe can only be reassuring to the ethnic minorities in the country

And I shall not repeat that this week Britain has been commemorating the 200th year of the abolition of the slave trade, an admirable mission undertaken by the deeply religious William Wilberforce.

Negative developments

Sadly, in Malaysia, certain members of the largest ruling party have vowed to bathe the non-Malays in blood to defend the Malay rights without being punished, and a cabinet minister has twice brandished his (in)famous keris in public and remains in office. How would the world make of the quality of our politicians these days?

The Kampung Medan incident may look trivial to Professor Shamsul, but it is clear that psychological scars are deep, and the community haunted. In the aftermath of the clash, the head of Wanita Umno in the area allegedly remarked that "the Malays here have been putting up with it for far too long". Without taking sides, I believe a public inquiry should least be held to find out what happened, and the same goes for the past tragedies from May 13 to Operasi Lalang.

To quote Partha Chatterjee, in post-colonial states, historians are tasked by the ruling elites to claim the right of the indigenous population the privilege of possessing a separate history. Suffice to say that the word 'indigenous' often evokes tiring debate and drains emotions in Malaysia, I hope the professor will at least be honest in facing the plight of the weaker communities in a country that is rightfully theirs.

Dr Lim Teck Ghee has just expressed his grave concern that Malaysia's racial politics is now bordering on Nazism. I do not share his pessimistic view in full. For one, Umno, unlike the Nazi party, does not have something called "die Endlsung" to solve "the Chinese Problem", and Chinese culture and education continue to flourish over the past few decades in spite of a hostile state.

But I agree Dr Lim is right to be apprehensive over the negative developments. I would not call it Malay dominance, but Umno hegemony. We must always stay alert and be cautious not to become racist ourselves in equalling the Malays with Umno.

When Adolf Hitler went to the crowd, he employed neither scholarly polemics nor sophisticated political jargons to articulate his xenophobic view. Instead, only simple questions were thrown at the masses: "Who is the smartest student in your class? Who is the doctor that you seek treatment from? Who owns the bank from which you borrow money?"

Sound familiar?

And compare all this to the questions posed in Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian year after year, masquerading as 'Rencana': "Kenapa Melayu Pulau Pinang terpinggir? Pernah mengira berapa kompleks beli-belah di ibu kota dimiliki usahawan Melayu?" It is not too difficult a job to figure out the veiled message behind.

A nation that is capable of repentance and remembrance like Germany and Britain will always have a promising future. While the Nazis are long gone and Germany is reborn as a stabiliser in an increasingly diverse and challenging European Union, Malaysia, almost half-century old, has regressed politically as Umno has successfully entrenched the victim psychology among the Malays.

To me, Umno is a racist party through and through, but it takes two to tango. Without the connivance of the MCA and the MIC, Umno could not have come thus far. If this worrying trend is not halted but left unchecked, it will not be long before the anchor of the BN becomes xenophobic given its increasingly centralised and concentrated power while playing with the politics of fear. The onus is on you and me, and we owe it to our future generations, regardless of who they are.