Census Operations in Superdiverse Societies
Adventures in Raciology
What is Australia’s “ethnicity”?
Sorting populations into “races” is a classic technique of colonial statecraft, justified by pseudoscience. Calling race “ethnicity” doesn’t make this sorting any less problematic. So, how did this practice become coded as a progressive measure in Australian discussions about diversity?
I’ve done my best to answer this question in my brand-new article in Ethnic and Racial Studies, which is open access, so I won’t reproduce the argument here.
Instead, I hope you’ll read the article, which problematises the Australian Government’s decision to enumerate us all by “ethnicity” (it used to prefer “ancestry”) from the 2026 census. It sets the decision in the context of Australia’s dynamic identity transformation since it abolished the White Australia Policy, and indeed the significant “Asianisation” of Australia since then.
Previous exercises in performing this kind of sorting have taken people into the weeds of what Paul Gilroy has called “raciology.” This one will too.
What about Malaysia? Who is a “Malay Muslim”?
We know that “Malay” is an aggregate racial category used by the Malaysian state, and it glosses over significant diversity among people known as “Malay” in Malaysia (there is something on this topic in my new article).
But if you consult Malaysian census materials to try to figure out who the state calls “Malay,” you’ll find your efforts complicated by the term “Bumiputera,” which it insists on presenting as an “ethnic group.”
Individuals hardly identify with it, though, and neither do political parties when they segment Malaysians into interest groups. Rather, it is a term the state uses to demonstrate that it includes the “natives” of Sabah and Sarawak, which the term groups together with “Malays.” The terms “Bumiputera” and “Malay” are not interchangeable.
Anyway, the infographic above shows the proportion of Malaysians who are Bumiputera: 69.9% in 2022 (brown), 69.6% in 2021 (blue), and 69.4% in 2020 (green).
So, who is Malay?
What about if we check the proportion of Malaysians who are Muslim? After all, the constitution specifies that all Malays are Muslim, so there should be significant overlap between these categories. Further, while Muslims who identify with many other “ethnic” labels also live in Malaysia, we can be confident that the majority of Malaysia’s Muslims are classed as “Malays.”
Well, the census also shows that 20.6 million Malaysians, from a total population of 32.4 million Malaysians, are Muslims. That’s 63.5%. You have to get your own calculator to work that figure out, though! It isn’t provided.
Anyway, with only this sort of vague data available online, you couldn’t cross-tabulate religion and ethnicity to figure out exactly who politicians are speaking to when they speak of, or to, Malay Muslims.
Perhaps if you cared to, and you were honest about your guesswork, you could deduce that Malay Muslims are around 60% of Malaysians.
Is there anybody out there who could help me find some more straightforward figures? It’s not essential, but I would like to see how the classifications work.
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This is a great point. Beautifully written: “Anyway, with only this sort of vague data available online, you couldn’t cross-tabulate religion and ethnicity to figure out exactly who politicians are speaking to when they speak of”