Striving for Social Inclusion and Justice

I was a target of bullying as a child and I was in pain. Growing up, I’ve always wished that I could make everyone in this world more empathetic. I started questioning, why were some people so mean? What if they knew it’s wrong? Was there anything that I could do to create change?

At some point, I came to realise,  it’s impossible to change the world. All I could do was to make little efforts to influence the people around me. That’s when I decided to be an advocate for social inclusion and justice.

Name-calling

I started off the journey by becoming a high school teacher under Teach For Malaysia to push for education equity. In my classroom, some students would often say things like “Cikgu, dia tu gay!” (“Teacher, he’s gay!”) or “Teacher, student X sells vegetables at the market, hahaha!” and then the whole class would laugh at the victim. 

I could have ignored those unhealthy behaviours – but I would not. I knew how the affected students would feel, so I decided to call out those behaviours and ask the students to reflect on the way they speak to each other. 

In the end, we agreed that the word ‘gay’ wasn’t a negative word and that it was wrong to ridicule other people or make fun of a person’s occupation. Since then, I stopped hearing them ridiculing each other in that manner in my lessons. 

This experience has taught me to call out if something’s not right, and that the most impactful changes could come from the little things I’ve never thought about.