Report from Asia--Confronting Prejudice

Yesterday I took a bus from Penang up to the Cameron Highlands, which are quite lovely. As I was getting on the bus I saw a fully veiled woman with a movie camera. The majority of Malaysians are Muslim. There are large Chinese and Indian populations as well. In the 1950s they had some pretty severe race riots here and since then the government has really worked to create racial tolerance. It's a good thing.

Since most Malaysian women are Muslim, most wear headscarfs. I don't really see any major problem with this. They are worn with different degrees of severity. Some keep them tight, some you can still see part of their hair. Some wear them with jeans or even capris, some with long dresses. It's all good I guess. And Muslim women are involved in Malaysian public life. They not only are cooking food at stalls but working as tollkeepers, at bus stations, and in other very public places. The person at customs I dealt with was even a woman. But what is really disturbing are the few women who wear not just the scarfs but the full veils, where you can only see their eyes. Some of these veils even keep the bridge of the nose covered. This I find upsetting.

Anyway, so I see one of these fully veiled women with a video camera. And what comes to mind for some reason but something I had read about Iraq I think, though it could have been Palestine, where women with video cameras had videotaped bombs. Now I wasn't worried about this happening, though if she had gotten on the bus I might have thought about it again. What worried me is this: why would I think this way? Why would this stereotype come into my head, especially in a country as safe as Malaysia? What causes us to think this way? I don't really have any good answers but it's worth pondering and I will be thinking about it for some time. I guess it has something to do with safety, something to do with the media, and something to do with inner fears of strange people. So it really bothers me that I felt that way.

The cultural tolerance long taught to me makes me feel bad. But on the other hand, I am angry that circumstances in the world exist where these worries would come into my head. And I am angry that women are forced to wear such restrictive clothing. I want to emphasize that in Malaysia, it is only a small minority of women who have to wear this, at least in the cities. But they are there. Cultural tolerance is one thing but laxity toward condeming things that you see as really bad is another. And I think that repressing women is bad. I thought that South Koreans beating their wives was bad, I told people this, and I was reported to the Department of Education for being a communist. I think that forcing women to wear super-restrictive clothing that basically denies them any individuality is bad. Maybe that means I am prejudiced for it. Maybe I was prejudiced against Korean culture as well.

Clearly I have prejudice to deal with it as my reaction to the women with the video camera shows. But it is not a black and white situation. Where do you draw the line between respecting other cultures and condemning what you find wrong? What is the line between seeing the world as a group of different cultures who have different customs that should be respected and feeling fear over those differences? Even though my thought was totally unjustified, these are hard questions to answer and I will be spending the rest of my trip pondering them.