Entry #6

During the group discussion we looked into the subject of racism and anti-Blackness mostly in the Arab world. Additionally for this week’s entry, I decided to take one of our professor’s suggested writing options and discussed the ideas of the readings with my friend Eman, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The first thing that I found apparent when discussing racism amongst Arabs with my friend, group and even through the class discussion is the normalization of racist linguistics amongst Arabs. In hindsight especially throughout school, diffrent slurs against poc would be thrown around but it would be considered as a “joke” and in this way it continues to be normalized. I’ve even witnessed people getting offended and deny their racism, using Islam which rejects racism as a defence. This further proves that dehumanizing words such as “abeed” (which translates to slaves) have become so integrated into the society that some Arabs are still blinded to it’s hatefulness. I also strongly agree with one of my group members that the normalization of racism is a huge issue in itself that needs to be acknowledged.

Something else we looked at during our weekly group discussion is another infamous “fair and lovely” ad, I was shocked to see the Indian actress Priyanka Chopra endorsing such a product. Eman noted how diffrent skin tones are regarded in diffrent cultures. She went onto say that in England for example being tan is more highly regarded, and tanning products are endorsed. In a video by John Maclean,he explains how skin tone is related to social status. Maclean goes onto say “there is always an element of hierarchy in everything and certainly when it comes to social issues surrounding either gender, race, class, creed, economics..” skin tone is indifferent, “it comes down to what we associate with wealth, what we associate with power we perceive to be better”.

Personally I agree with his point, in Qatar for instance while there are dark skinned Qatari’s being fair is considered more beautiful and is preferred. The best example for this I can think of that the people in my group agreed with is when a man wants to get married, many ask for her to be fair. This is integrated into our culture that even my best friend growing up who is mixed, was highlighting how her brother’s wife is fair and called it “eugenics”. Eugenics according to history “is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits”, and in this case it connects to becoming lighter. It boils down to the societal structure that started subjecting woman and expecting them to be the highest form purity which got associated with them being white.