Fitur
Virtues of Hegemony
Shedding Light to the Underlying Majority-Minority Divide in a Bias Urban Sphere
As an Indonesian raised in a middle-class urban environment, the belief of religion and the existence of God as a higher being had always been instilled in me from as early as I remember. God serves as the entity that sets out and oversees all that what we do and religion as the tightrope upon we hold on our life to as guidance to be closer to Him. Working our asses off in this life meant devoting ourselves in Him in all that we do, as only He would be the one to grant us our path in life. Thus, the belief (and fear) in such grand notion became the golden ticket for a secure life and, consequently, afterlife.
For the purpose of this feature, I’d like to further stress and contextualize the characteristics of Bandung as a city. Through this lens, cities are seen as melting pots that bring together people of various classes, bound by a growing urban economy. Bandung is the melting pot for people from all sorts of religion, race, and other walks of life, united by the uni-life atmosphere, cool weather, creative urban lifestyle, and Instagram-able tourist hot spots.
In a longer term, it is apparent that people usually opt to settle in Bandung to gain access to better education and job opportunities in a much calmer urban environment.With a bustling economy and lifestyle, living in a vibrant city like Bandung thus gives you opportunities to meet people from all walks of life. Public figures in particular, fueled by a divided society’s constant demand for representation, have proliferated across all classes and have even redefined class fragmentation and majority-minority contest in an urban working environment.
Alongside its heterogeneous social environment, unlike many other big cities in Java and Bali, conservatism still becomes the pinnacle of Bandung’s urban lifestyle — as simple as: one won’t simply choose a cafe to work in if it doesn’t have a suitable musholla right? In all,in the context of practicing your religion, should you believe in the few acknowledged religions by the government, living in Bandung grants you with access and ability to various places of worship.
Despite the apparent means for heterogeneity, it turns out that hegemonic practices in local politics, economy, and social affairs in urban societies are inevitable. Many have become witness to cases of religious discrimination, violence, and even persecution on the basis of being ‘different’ from the eyes of the many.
Statistically speaking, the distribution of the Indonesian population is heavily concentrated in Java and with an urban population of 53 percent in 2015. According to Minority Rights Group Indonesia, more than 85 percent of Indonesians consider themselves as Muslims, titling Indonesia nominally as the largest Muslim nation in the world. This number is followed by 7 percent of the population being Christians, Roman Catholic 2.9 percent, Hindu 1.7 percent, other religions (including Buddhist and Confucian) at 0.9 percent, and another unspecified 0.4 percent.
In the past decade, though not to disregard the persecution years before, the conditions for religious inclusivity have worsened. Segregation and dominance in society prevails. Cases of burning down of churches, imprisonment to those who protest the sound of adzan, cleansing of the ‘religiously-astray’ and ‘morally-wrong’, rallies in big cities sounding for religious justice —crystallizing the very notion of inequality that is escalated in pursuit of and to justify specific political or religious interests of (the few within) the many, as stated by Hew Wai Weng.
For a nation that champions the motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika or Unity in Diversity, the increasing number of persecutions of those few on the basis of their religion and race, has bought about criticisms on intolerance, lack of public discourse, and the government’s lack of action in combating such practices. What this means, is that people are fighting back, by the referred minorities included.
So one goes to wonder, in the context of Indonesian urban societies, more specifically speaking in Bandung, who are these minorities? What is it like to feel like a minority? Does being a minority alternatively translate to being discriminated? Just how different would life be in comparison to being a part of the ruling majority in an urban atmosphere? How wide is this exclusivity gap and how does it really effect an urban society?
Majority-Minority City
Living in a predominantly Muslim country and, more specifically, city, accustomed me to living as a Muslim. What this meant was that, to everyone’s delight, on Fridays breaks would be longer because of the Friday sermon and prayers. The Ramadhan holy month and its festivities meant more days off of work/school than any other time of the year. Belonging to the mainstream made it easier for you to do your routine. It meant that the government welcomed people to practice their religion by granting time off from their daily routine.
But can policy alone ensure that minorities, those lying outside the mainstream race and religion, will not be discriminated? Isn’t policy also biased? Even if it isn’t, can it provide the needed closure for minorities to be recognized as equals?
In truth, at least in my perspective as a Muslim minority, the answer is no.
From an ethnic perspective, let’s take for example the lives of the minority ethnic Chinese Indonesians. As they first arrived in Java in the 13th century, it is evident have long contributed to the colours of Indonesian society, both in terms of economic development and cultural enrichment. The review by the South China Morning Post shows that the ups and downs for these people throughout the course of the Old and New Order has finally bought about ‘ more equal’ opportunities for the ethnic Chinese as Indonesian citizens: the acknowledgement of Chinese names, practice of Chinese martial arts, distribution of traditional Chinese medicine, and the Chinese New Year even acknowledged as a national public holiday.
Nevertheless, persecutions have not really stopped. There are still unfair sentiments towards these Indonesian Chinese, despite their contribution towards Indonesian culture as a whole.
In an urban context, should you notice that, in terms of spatial patterns in cities, such phenomena has, one of which, lead to the establishment of and social segregation through gated neighbourhoods with homogeneous ethnic divides, on top of one’s economic and religious backgrounds. What this means is that, as a minority, your options to live in a society, to buy a house and settle down for example, account also for you to consider your neighbour’s acceptance of your ethnic or religious background, alternately limiting your freedom to choose and become an affluent urbanite.
Granted that as humans and social beings we tend to gather among those whom we are most comfortable with and are most alike to, but the moment that we use such one-sided standards as means for labeling and treating others differently for the mere sake that they are not like us, that’s when we know that discrimination still persists.
Another equally pressing aspect of discrimination that I would like to stress is the construction of one-sided (and often unjust) standards upon minorities that somehow have become ‘acceptable’ in an urban society.
To illustrate my point: why shouldn’t Christmas decorations be allowed to be displayed in shopping centers when we’d have Ramadhan-inspired decorations for a whole month? Why should we label and discriminate certain jobs for certain ethnic groups? Why should those who do not fast respect those who do by not eating in sight of them? Why do we think it is permissible for the majority Muslim community to conduct their prayers on roads but we are not accepting of those who practice in churches or temples? I’ll let you contemplate.
We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved center stage both politically and ethically. A lot of political energy is put into promoting, protecting and articulating their significance in the construction of a better world. — David Harvey in ‘Right to the City’
On a more darker note, conversely, as these bizarre standards become more and more ‘normal’, so does the spread of hatred and fear, usually wrongly instilled upon towards those who might be innocent to begin with or perpetuated by those who might not even understand the sheer scale of their actions.
Due to the growing political agenda and adhering profile that comes with it, many have even grown fearful of becoming who they really are, knowing that their ethnic or religious traits might bring them jeopardy in society. Many fear to express their religious beliefs in public, fearful of entering certain areas of the city, some even threatened to become part of the mainstream community as if they were astray to begin with.
In turn, we also begin to take precautions of the ‘threats’ that differences in society bring about. According to power threat theory proposed by Drew, Sleek, and Mikulak (2018), the majority responds to these status threats by creating or tightening state control in racialized ways; one example is the support for intensifying immigration laws. In the United States, that support primarily has targeted Mexicans. In Europe, it has focused significantly on Muslims — now fueled by Islamic extremists’ recent terrorist attacks in Paris.
I believe that a lot of this has to do with mass media — its powers of indirectly stimulating ideas . Harvey notes how politicized notions of human rights bearing social justice and equality for all have become, though justified all the same should it really bring about change for the better. However, utilizing and even glorifying emotion like fear and hatred, especially in times of crisis, to make way for political fulfillment is shallow, self-centered, and degrading the rights of man including yourself.
Achieving Balance in Hegemony: the Struggle for Tolerance in Bandung
To me, discrimination is rooted from the feeling of exclusivity and of having power above others. This exclusivity exists when we don’t know. Our sentiments, or those forced upon us by mainstream information and propaganda, blind us from who people truly are: people.
We don’t realize that we are all people: struggling economically, facing the same potentially life-threatening diseases, dragging our bodies to commute to and from work, equally fearful of the same rain above our heads. And even when we do know, we purposely turn a blind eye to it and force to see the situation in our own eyes, merely because we think that our problems and interests are above others. In doing so, we greedily assume people to cope how we cope, understand how we understand the world, barring others that ‘can’t’ to be ‘different’ and ‘less’.
Referring back to living in an urban society, you’d think that living in a melting pot of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, ultimately signifying the main social characteristics of a city (Dahiden, 2009), that people would be more accustomed to differences, at least more accepting than other more homogeneous societies.
Religion and ethnic backgrounds embodies who you are through the values you hold dear and is the corridor in which you conform to your virtues to. It constitutes ones perception of life and its subsequent afterlife and shouldn’t be perceived through behaviour and practice alone.
Thus, if in practice differences still persist, then that should still be permissible. However, when persecutions against religious and ethnic minorities become society’s way of dealing with those differences, should one think that, as urban dwellers, we are the ones that have gone astray? Is that the kind of society we want to live in as the embodiment of the virtues we hold dear?
…the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual ri ght since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
So the next time you meet someone, instead of prying about their background and judging them by their age, their skin colour, the structure of their face, or the religious outfit or head piece that they wear, just have it in you to ask them — how are you? I hope you have a nice day.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect Kolektif Agora’s.References
- Semyonov, M., Raijman, R., Tov, A. Y., & Schmidt, P. (2004). Population size, perceived threat, and exclusion: A multiple-indicators analysis of attitudes toward foreigners in Germany. Social Science Research, 33, 681–701.
- Drew, A., Sleek, S., & A. M. (2016, March/April). When the Majority Becomes the Minority. Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/when-the-majority-becomes-the-minority
- Carpi, E. (2015, May 4). The Abused Politics of “Minorities” and “Majorities”: Quantifiable Entities or Shifting Sites of Power? Retrieved from http://humanityjournal.org/blog/the-abused-politics-of-minorities-and-majorities-quantifiable-entities-or-shifting-sites-of-power/
- The Inclusive City | Initiative on Cities. (2018). Retrieved from http://www.bu.edu/ioc/inclusive-city-summary-report/
- Fealy, G. (2018). Indonesia’s troubled minorities. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/national/indonesia-s-troubled-minorities-20180913-p503i6.html
- http://www.newmandala.org/defending-islam-reclaiming-diversity/
- Weng, H. W. (2016, December 14). Defending Islam and reclaiming diversity. Retrieved from http://www.newmandala.org/defending-islam-reclaiming-diversity/
