KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 19 — Lecturer Murni Wan Mohd Nor professed to be a long-time activist fighting against hate speech and discrimination, but that has not stopped her from facing the brunt of bigotry.
Murni related that even at a recent human rights regional meeting, she was at the end of several racist comments from some who did not even realise they were uttering them. She counted at least five different comments in just a span of 20 minutes.
“For a long time, I have been a victim of hate speech and racism, from when I was young until I was an adult, whether I’m in Malaysia or abroad,” she told the audience while launching her book which she hopes can help kickstart conversations on the matter, titled When Love Heals Hate.
The book aimed at children from age five to 12 was personal to her and was inspired by real-life events, she said. The two characters in it were also inspired by her daughter and son.
It tells the story of a girl named Afiya who went to a new school and to her surprise, saw another kid getting bullied. Together with her friends, they stand up to the bully.
“The book tackles an issue we don’t want to talk about,” said the senior lecturer at the faculty of human ecology at Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Murni lists her focus as freedom of expression, hate speech and its impact on social cohesion, and media representation on racial and religious issues.
Although the story has been kept inside her for many years, she said she only began working on the book for the past year and a half.
“Children at a young age are becoming racist because of the values that they’re gaining from other people, whether or not it’s their friends or from home. More often than not, family members without realising it, say racist things, but they think their kids are not observing it.
“They say it at the dinner table, for casual conversation not realising that this shapes the perception of children, they’re going to go out to the world and reinforce these stereotypes,” she said.
Vowing to be a part of the solution, Murni hopes that parents will open up and educate their children when they ask questions about why certain people are different from them by highlighting the beauty in diversity.
“All children have the ability to understand these things, we just need to actively and intentionally teach them consistently,” she said.
Murni also said she yearns for anti-racism initiatives in schools where teachers are trained how to teach children about humanitarian issues and how to go about mingling with different races which she acknowledges would take more than two years to bear fruit.
“We are not obliged to agree on every single thing, but how do we learn to disagree respectfully? That’s something we’re not taught,” she said.
She pointed to the recent controversy caused by the Palestine Solidarity Week, which had instead seen some schools going down the route of glorifying violence.
“When we want to teach children to care about the plight of Palestinians, we don’t want them to be anti-Semitic either, to criticise Jewish people and the religion of Judaism but this is the kind of nuance that is not taught, and this is a really big problem,” she said.