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Old 2012-06-12, 03:16   Link #33
Ridwan
Senior Member
 
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: قلوب المؤمنين
I have encountered numerous, pretty much countless of racist occurrences, some of which certainly had befallen me, being a mish-mash of several ethnic groups myself with a tint of Yemeni-Hejazi descent living in a country of 300 something ethnic groups.

In Indonesia, Arabic ancestry, for several reasons, occasionally gets associated with weird, funny stuff, including their physical traits such as that distinctive nose. Of course since they're usually muslims so they don't have it as bad as the Chinese, but getting prankfully called "camel" or "syeikh" just means friday. I'm only 97% pribumi, so my semitic phenotypes show quite boldly in my face. However, for some people it can be rather difficult to tell apart between West and South Asians so I got confused with Shah Rukh Khan for many times since we both have similar nose...

Dad is half-Javanese, half (Arab-descended) Mollucan, while mom is a Batak of Harahap surname, so I got mistaken for a christian sometimes. Usually it's okay, save for this one occasion when I visited a friend who belong to some weird, strict Islamic sect that teaches that non-believers are filthy so you should mop your floor whenever they're doing a visit to your home. My friend knew of my muslim background, but his dad didn't. To be fair, at least a third of the Harahaps are christians. But sometimes getting mistaken as a christian helps me whenever dealing with the more Islamophobic/paranoid kind of non-muslims...

I was raised in an exceptionally multiethnic family collectively rich with experience of dealing with pretty much every kind of people so I'm very well accustomed with pluralism. In fact I kinda do worse in the more homogeneous environments. Currently I'm residing in a semi-countryside 2 hours with bus from Bandung, West Java, and unfortunately ended up in a more culturally-aware corner of the campus.
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