Racism in Malaysia’s housing market: how landlords get away with barring African and South Asian tenants
Indian and mixed-race tenants reveal their flat-hunting woes in multicultural Malaysia, which has no law against racial discrimination and no plans to enact one, allowing property owners to run ads saying ‘Chinese only’ or ‘No African’
Anyone who’s had to find a new place to live understands how daunting it can be. Searching for a convenient location, setting up viewings, sifting through paperwork and considering your budget take time and effort.
It gets even more complicated when landlords don’t want tenants of your ethnicity – and you can’t even get a viewing.
In Malaysia, people of African and Indian descent suffer most when it comes to racism in the property market. In June 2016, residents at a condominium complex in Cheras, a municipality outside Kuala Lumpur, made headlines when they put up a banner encouraging landlords to “say no to African people”. The bright red banner also bore the image of a dark-skinned man with a large yellow X across his face.
Agents asked us what races we were. My housemate called one, who ... after being told that I am half-Chinese and half-Indian ... [asked] if I was fair-skinned like a Chinese person, or darker
The “Housing Law” referred to on the banner is not an actual law, but rather a set of guidelines created by the administration (tenants) in the residential complex. There is no way to regulate these guidelines, because Malaysia does not have anti-discrimination or anti-racism laws in place. The government has no plans to propose such laws any time soon, Prime Minister Najib Razak said late last year.
It’s uncertain how many Africans live in Malaysia, but statistics suggest the number runs into the tens of thousands. The Cheras case wasn’t the first incident of discrimination against African people in the capital. In 2013, residents of a condominium complex in the Subang Jaya district voted during an annual meeting to stop renting units to foreigners from Africa. A memo circulated, stating that the reason for the ban was that people from Africa cause “a lot of nuisance and problems in the community”.
