BLM in the Arab world too. The life-threatening racism in Saudi Arabia
I am a Sudanese women. For those who don’t know Sudan, it’s an Arabic, predominantly black country, with a Muslim majority. However, I did not grow up in Sudan. I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and lived there until my late teens. My parents — searching for a better life for their family — decided to migrate there in the late 80s.
I did not experience outright racism, nor had I seen it until I went to primary school. There, I was among the few dark skinned girls in the classroom. The only difference between me and the other dark skinned girls was that I am Sudanese, while they were black Saudis. I remember being in the car with my parents and seeing a 5-year-old point to me and my siblings and say “Khala”, which is basically the Saudi N word. I didn’t feel terrified or scared, but more like ashamed and embarrassed of my skin colour. I can’t count the number of times I dwelled on how comfortable my life would be if I was just white, and in Saudi I guess “less dark”. The black community was very separate from non-black Saudi communities. They never mixed, they had their own weddings, social friendship groups and sometimes even neighbourhoods. Most importantly, they never intermarried.
Racism in Saudi, and how it effects black people there, cannot be quantified, as ethnicity is simply not documented. There is no field in any government document where they ask you about your ethnicity, and even though Saudi Arabia is a very tribalistic country, they don’t ask about tribe either. In other words, there is no way of telling how the black community is affected by anything. This makes it difficult for someone like me to speak about race or address it in that context.
While BLM in the US is about covert and subtle systemic racism, in Saudi it was right in your face. There was no way I could mistake it for anything else, or pretend it did not exist.
When I came back to Sudan, a predominantly black country, I felt relief but also realised this sort of discrimination exists everywhere in the Arab world. In Sudan, it was linked to where your tribe is from. Northern and central Sudanese tribes were considered superior to Western tribes, and that is mainly because northern tribes were generally — though not always — fairer in colour and had more Arabic looking features than African ones, compared to Western tribes. I went to Jordan for as a tourist and had to pretend I did not speak Arabic while two guys were joking loudly about how I was “burnt from too much Sun exposure”. I went to Egypt where I was cat called “Souda”. Just a few months ago, an Egyptian comedian actress wore a black face in a comedy series!
This is not the serious part, though. The most dangerous type of racism for me is one that translates into inequity, be it in employment, services or in-front of the law. This type of racism is incredibly predominant in the Arab world. If you think what I went through was sad, wait for it.. a lot of people had it way worse. Specifically, migrant workers who come from their countries to occupy second class jobs that no “national” is prepared to do. Things like maids, cooks, and in Saudi, shepherds. They come because they have families to support, and dreams to fulfil, but they end up having to deal with derogatory treatment and sub-human rights.
If you don’t know about this, Saudi has an individual sponsorship scheme, by which Saudi nationals have the ability to bring a migrant worker under their names and pay their salaries. They also have the right to hold on to your passport, so you can’t escape if they don’t want you to. There have been many instances of sexual assault and physical abuse, especially for women who work as maids or baby-sitters. Often, they can’t complain because they need the money, and they know they will be sent back if they do. But at times they don’t even have the privilege to make that choice, and are effectively kept hostage by their sponsors. Even worse, some of them become pregnant and are lynched because adultery is a punishable crime. Human Rights Watch described working conditions in Saudi as “near slavery” and says it stems from deeply ingrained gender, religious and racial discrimination.
I remember watching a video on YouTube, where they were hosting women who have maids in their houses in Lebanon — which has a similar sponsorship scheme to the Saudi one. The women debated whether or not they have the right to “discipline” their maids if they don’t do their jobs well. If that is not slavery, I don’t know what is.
Many countries have created initiatives and warned the Saudi government they would deny visas to their citizens to go and work in Saudi, if the Saudi government does not make efforts to protect their workers. Guess what the Saudi response to that was? “if you do so we will just get workers from another country”.
What makes this even worse, is that a lot of women are going through rape and abuse, but they as they don’t have a voice out there, it often feels like nobody cares about them. Even with all the progress made by the BLM movement in the US, these migrant workers are still invisible to many of us.
So many people are working in these countries for below minimum wage, in subhuman conditions and with no rights at all, but they have no other option in the midst of a capitalist global framework where everyone can get away with abusing their power and piling wealth, aided by cheap labour. The only response given is very similar to the Saudi one, “if you don’t take this job, someone else will”. Or on a more national/international level, “if you don’t let us avoid taxes, we will find another country to invest in”.
In the wake of BLM, it is important for the Arab world to join in on this conversation and confront its blatant racism. None of the Arab countries are safe for black people — I have seen this with my own eyes in the places I’ve been, and heard about it from my friends who have seen it in the places I haven’t. It is also important for communities of colour to realise that the conversation is not just about race, or colour, but also about class. And whether we admit or not, our experiences as black and POC are not the same. I am black, but I am also a middle class educated women, and that makes my experiences of racism less extreme.