The biggest parade in Malaysian political narrative is how the call for unity is in reality a call for disunity. This comes about because calls for unity tend to be rhetorical appeals for racial unity vis-à-vis other races.

Since all societies today, and Malaysia started out already that way, are multi-cultural in reality, racial unity means inter-racial disunity. Such a paradigm cannot help but incessantly provoke confrontation and distrust. No common long-term goals can be sustained. Worse than that, any serious discussion becomes potentially a polarising one, be it over type of education, form of worship, style of dressing, food for eating, treatment of women, etc.

As the distrust grows, the calls for unity take on a religious character – religion being the major historical determinant of race. We see this happen more and more the worse the country's economic conditions become. This is nothing new, nothing surprising.

We saw how desperate times in Germany in the 1930s led to the rise of a radically racist regime and the momentum of that change quickly led to the destruction of traditional German society. With the fall of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1945, it became politically inexcusable in the West to use ‘race’ as the rationale for formulating policies. In academia, we saw the dropping of the term ‘race’ from practically all discussions, in favour of ‘ethnicity’ as the apparently more neutral and therefore more scientifically acceptable concept.

Racialism became a rhetorical taboo globally. This did not in any way mean that racism was history. Far from it. It just meant that policy arguments based on race had very little traction after the Second World War. There were still some attempts to plant racialism as the rationale for state building. One was the generally unrecognised Republic of Rhodesia, which in 1978 had to transform itself into multicultural Zimbabwe. Another more significant case was South Africa's apartheid regime, which lasted too long – from 1948 to 1994.

In the USA, where the suppression of black Americans had continued despite the ending of slavery in 1865, the civil rights movement managed in the 1960s to reduce substantially racial bias in administrative practices.