Stereotyping Malaysians

Innovative architecture: Marina Tabassum’s Khudi Bari, a modular mobile house for the climate victims of Bangladesh. – Asif Salman/Agencies

MANY years ago, when I was a foolish young woman, I made a horrible mistake. Greeting a friend who came to visit me, I told her that her driver could park his car nearby. She looked a bit shocked; her “driver” was in fact her partner. I had made a judgment on his profession simply by the way he looked. In other words, I had stereotyped him based entirely on his outward appearance. I’m still embarrassed about it.

Many of us have gone through this, stereotyping people just by looking at them. We assume some people are lazy, some are conniving, some are uneducated based not on their individual capabilities but on generalisations we have made on entire groups of people.