COMMENT | Where are the seeds of prejudice first planted? In our children. That’s according to numerous child development studies.

A well-known study was Jane Elliott’s “blue-eyed brown-eyed” role play with children in 1968 in Iowa, soon after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Elliott’s experiment showed that American school children were at that time raised in an environment of racial segregation. They were socialised to think that Blacks were born to serve and Whites to be served. Some to rule, others to be ruled.

That was how Hitler Youths were indoctrinated with the ideology of Aryan supremacy, and Afrikaner children, insulated from decades of injustices against Black South Africans, formed their prejudices through the apartheid that ended in 1993.

In our case, Malay and non-Malay children are raised to...