The perception of unity among students : in the case of students in UiTM KK and UMS KK / Haifey Kamarudin and Mohd Zulhilmi Khairi

Unity according to oxford dictionary means the state of being in agreement and working together; the state of being joined together to form one unit (Unity, 2015). The meaning of unity universally always associated with the diversity of multiracial living together. Countries such as Malaysia are well known for their multi-cultural and ethnicity diversity. Other than Malaysia, America too is one of the countries in the world with diversity of races and cultural varieties. What so special about these countries is that they can live as a nation regardless their ethnicity and races. According to Mansur (2014), the Americans' unities are divided into several factors. Diversity of religions is one of the main factors for their unities. "The country's founders recognized that the fragile alliance of states that made up the early United States would only survive if it could unify its diverse, competing and conflicting religious and ethnic groups into the fold of a new, collective national identity".(Mansur,2014). Other than that, like any other multi-diverse in cultural and ethnicity country, racial issue is something that is familiar to these multidiverse cultural and ethnicity countries. For instance in America, the Black Vs. White people stereotype perceptions still exist in the hearts of some Americans. This can be proven in the article published in the New Washington Post where the authors had discuss the inequality of justice systems when concerning criminal justice system." Only 1 in 10 African American says blacks and other minorities receive equal treatment with whites in the criminal justice system. Only about 2 in 10 say they are confident that the police treats whites and black equally, whether they have committed a crime"(Balz & Clement, 2014). Whereas in Malaysia, the racial issue are divided into the three main ethnics. Malaysia is known as the multi-racial country because there are three main ethnic groups and they are the Malays, Chinese, and Indians. According to Ng (1992) as cited in Richard Leete (1996), there are also several small minorities, the largest of whom are the Orang Asli, a rural indigenous people. Of the three main groups, the Malays are usually considered as indigenous and the Chinese and Indians as immigrants (Leete, 1996). There are issues about the races since before independence and that is unity. This is because each of the races has their own community and trying to protect it from being discriminate by other races. They are being unsecured to each other races because of the issues that occurred on 13th May 1969, the racial riots between the Malays and Chinese. After the incident of 13th May 1969 the parliament come up with a few solutions in order to avoid discrimination of all races such as the "Rukun Negara" or the official state ideology had been announced and a New Economic Policy (NEP) had been unwrapped (Comber, 1983). This is in order to restructure the economic imbalance between the Malays and Chinese. According to Comber (1983), if the spirit of the NEP is adhered to in practice, so that, as the plan says, 'no particular group will experience any loss or feel any sense of deprivation', then there can be no objection to it.