“Everyday practices embedded in institutions, institutional and individual, produce the accumulation of economic, political and social rewards for whites while valorizing and normalizing whiteness.” (Christian, M. (2018). A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (Thousand Oaks, Calif.), page 177. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649218783220)
Being a black international student has taught me one thing: Everyplace but sub saharan Africa seems to have it out for you. I for one always find myself googling the same thing before I travel to a new place: “How racist is place X towards black people?” Usually the answers are never pleasant.
As luck would have it, I recently discovered something that I was unable to find on my initial search in Qatar(where I live). I leant what the word for a black person was: abed or slave.
The fact that I was furious shouldn’t come as a surprise. I see it as the equivalent of the N word. It packages years of oppression and white supremacy into 4 words. Personally this is one of the reasons why I think there needs to be more honest conversations about the Gulf’s role in the slave trade.
The callousness of the word abed is such that it signifies both race and class. I’ll be the first to say that the marriage of these two social constructs is as impressive as it is appalling.With some understanding of etymology, one can aptly reason that: To be black is to slave and vice versa. As furious as I was with this discovery, I had to only look at the majority of the black people in Qatar. Most of them slaving away in blue collar jobs. The racialisation of labour here is a literal reflection of the dialectic occurring in the word abed. To have the audacity to call someone this reinforces the weight of a system of oppression that screams out at those black people that attempt to defy it. It means that to be black here, one can not be anything but a slave. This is probably why you will never see a white person driving a bus in Doha. The system relies on their being those relegated to the lower class. In this particular case, it seems to explicitly target those blessed with melanin.
One need not think of whether the chicken or egg came first: The slave or the race of the slave? Personally I don’t think it matters. What matters is that we all realise that we are playing right into the hands of an economic system that is still in a long distance relationship with white supremacy. It masks itself through euphemisms that racialise class and prevent people from seeing the humanity within others. So the hope is that we purge our languages of speech that seeks to harm and degrade the humanity of others.
Till then, drink water and decolonize your vocabulary.