What is your skin colour worth?

 

FEB 5 — Complete bewilderment washed over me when I read that a golf club had assigned a price tag to my skin colour.

While I may  not care very much for golf, I could  not help but feel horribly affronted for the members of Kelab Golf Negara Subang (KGNS) who are charged membership fees according to their race. But they did choose to be members of the club anyway, which, I guess, is well and  good if they can afford it. Though it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth that anyone would want to be part of a club that practises racial discrimination, under however posh a guise.

According to reports — and the now famous image of the club’s notice of membership prices — Malays are worth between RM35,000 and RM65,000, the Chinese are priced from RM45,000 to RM80,000, and Indians are worth anything between RM60,000 and RM80,000 each. Malaysians who do not fall in either of these categories fetch between RM40,000 and RM50,000.

As crude as the above paragraph sounds, this is what  KGNS did. And now its president says the club does this to “encourage multiculturalism.” How does charging different membership prices according to someone’s race “encourage multiculturalism”? Must multiculturalism only be encouraged among the more wealthy members of society?

On the flipside, if there is a serious effort to encourage various races to mingle, then ensure equal numbers among all races — at the same cost. Too much to ask? If we want to  talk about multiculturalism, there are plenty  ways to encourage this: abolish race-based policies, kill race-based politics, elevate the standard of education a hundred-fold and close down vernacular schools.

In other words, ensure an equal playing field in everything, including golf memberships. (The other place which suddenly comes to mind, where skin  colour determines value in monetary terms, is the sex trade.)

We know we live in a country where equal opportunity is a bad phrase. And as Malaysians, we have come to accept that some opportunities are lost to us because we do not belong to a particular race. But in golf? Seriously?