Marina Mahathir celebrates diversity; Khalid Samad tours St Anne’s Church

Writer-activist Marina Mahathir today talked up diversity as an asset for the country in the Putra Lecture organised by the Penang Free School Foundation at Wawasan Open University.

A crowd of some 200 gathered to listen to Marina, who shot into the limelight recently after she turned up at the Klang Catholic Church with a group of like-minded Muslims to present flowers to the priest and parishioners in a bid to reduce tensions created by right-wing Muslim groups over the Allah controversy.

When someone from the floor rose to ask her what she thought of religious extremism, she said she didn’t believe in religious extremism as there was nothing religious about being an extremist – a response which drew loud applause from the audience.

She added that what we are seeing now is actually political manipulation disguised as religious extremism, as the audience clapped again.

Marina said she is now studying psychology and noted some research studies had shown that negative stereotyping of certain ethnic groups and of their gender (female) could have an impact on participants’ academic or other achievements if they felt that race and gender were important considerations.

According to Wikipedia, this is known as the ‘stereotype threat’:

The strength of the stereotype threat that occurs depends on how the task is framed. If a task is framed to be neutral, stereotype threat is not likely to occur; however if tasks are framed in terms of active stereotypes, participants are likely to perform worse on the task. For example, a study on chess players revealed that women players performed more poorly than expected when they were told they would be playing against a male opponent. In contrast, women who were told that their opponent was female performed as would be predicted by past ratings of performance.

This in itself is grounds for us to consider doing away with the need to have students state their gender or ethnicity when taking examinations.

Marina also took issue with the composition of the National Unity Consultative Council, which only took into consideration ethnic diversity. But the council lacked adequate representation from women and youth, she said.

This raised another issue as to why we tend to think of diversity only in terms of ethnicity and not other types of diversity such as gender, age and (income) class.

On a lighter note, Marina pointed out that she had a connection with Penang Free School as her grandfather had served as a teacher there for a few years. (Other luminaries who had studied at the school include Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra himself, Sungai Siput MP Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj, noted academic Dr Khoo Boo Teik of Aliran, and 1935 Nobel Prize for Medicine nominee Dr Wu Lien-teh.)

While Marina was speaking in Penang, Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad was visiting GE13 whistle-blower Major Zaidi in Bertam on mainland Penang to express support for the beleagured air force officer, widely seen as a hero or patriot willing to stand up for what he thought was wrong.

In the afternoon, Khalid visited St Anne’s Church in Bukit Mertajam. There, Penang Bishop Sebastian Francis accompanied the Pas MP on a tour of the sprawling church premises. While strolling around the church grounds, Khalid had a chance to stop and briefly address participants attending a couple of church programmes.

When contacted, Khalid said, “I told them, my colleagues and I were doing our best to reduce the tensions that have been created in the country.” He also told the participants that, as citizens who love the country, they too had an important role to play in forging greater unity.