The Thobe Identity

A couple of nights back, some friends and I decided to hang out by the Corniche. We drove along the long stretch of seaside looking for a spot to sit and have our dinner and meaningless conversations. We would check the people already sitting to gauge the safety of the spot of our choice. Finally, we decided to sit some distance from a group of guys that looked harmless. They weren't loud, they weren't playing music, they weren't monkeying around, and they didn't seem to be wearing thobes.

As we unpacked and got ready to settle down, one of the guys from that group stood up. He was, in fact, wearing a thobe. There was an undeniable pause and an audible gasp from our group. Crap. We just might get harassed after all.

We ended up staying anyway, and the guys left us alone. We weren't assaulted.

***

"You don't change the city; the city changes you."

This city suffers from acute racism. Discrimination, stereotyping, prejudice, bias, judgment, typecasting, labeling, you name it whatever politically incorrect *gasp* scandalous term you want, it's here. It's such a commonplace thing to do that it has become a valid justification.

Here's a snippet of a typical conversation:

"Oh, that's horrible! Why do you think that happened?"

"What do you expect? He is *insert nationality after changing tone to one of disgust*."

"Ah." *insert bright background beam of enlightenment*

Yeah, what a shame, since there are people from all kinds of countries and cultures residing here. We are the ultimate cliché of a melting pot.

There are layers of discrimination, too. It's very organized-crime-ish.

People here are divided into two:

1. The locals, i.e. Saudis
2. The foreigners, i.e. expatriates

The locals are further subdivided into:

1. The Bedouins. People that are so backward-thinking that they slam against their own backs. They buy techie gadgets and sacreligiously misuse them. They are blind followers of ancient cultural norms; they stink of the sand from the deserts and the tents from whence they come. They wear unflattering sacks they call clothes and even though they have kept up with fashion trends, they're still 10 years behind. They drink their coffee, and talk their talk, and dance their dance, and sing their music, all of them painfully old-fashioned and out-of-date.
2. The New Age Saudis. You see them cruising around with their expensive cars and their trendy thobes and gilded abayas, speaking their English, drinking their franchise-café lattes. They shop in high-end boutiques and they smell of French perfume. They tell stories of summer vacations in Europe and they live for big family matches and milkahs and weddings. They are "open-minded", they are Western, they are upper middle upper-middle class. The young men with their raging hormones chasing after the young women at malls. The young women inviting harassment from their male counterparts with their coy glances and painted nails. Some of them are wildly educated, quoting literary icons and asserting their political views and their distaste of the mainstream pop culture. They are the bohemian bourgeoisie.
3. The Hybrids. The half-Saudi, half-something else. The ones with the western accents, the mixture of features, the confused where-am-I-from rhetoric , the identity crises. They are outsiders through and through, too foreign to the Saudis and too Saudi to the foreigners.

Which brings us to the foreigners. They could have lived their whole lives in this city, learned the language, absorbed the standards of behavior and the points of view. Or they could have just moved to the city from their home countries, staying for work, or staying with their working parents. They are subdivided into the following major categories:

1. Zee Arabs. The Lebanese, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Morroccans, the Jordanians, the Palestinians, the Turks, the Tunisians, the Iranians, who cares what continent sub-continent they come from - they look Arab, they sound Arab. Them with their food, and their men and women, and their wild hair, their music and their dancing, their morals, and why can't they speak with proper Arabic accents, and why are they influencing the youth?
2. The Asians. The little people. Indonesians and Filipinos. Excellent kitchen people. They clean your house, raise your kids, steal your jewelry, seduce your husbands, cast spells on your family. You have to squint your eyes to understand what they're saying when they swallow the consonants and the crucial vowels and they bastardize your language. Third world people who corrupt societies with their DBDs DBDs, buy-the-latest-DBD-sadik, and their homosexuals bisexuals multisexualities.
3. The South Asians. Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Sri Lankans. The rolling tongue accents and the beads on their foreheads and on their clothes and on their hands and their bellies, and their saris, and that slicked-back hair, and the onions and spices, and the ignorance, the deceit.
4. The Africans. The thievery, the conning, that dark dark skin, always suspect. Oh, they bring in drugs and prostitution and HIV, they deal in their little adobes and they walk around with their deep baritones and the white eyes.
5. The Westerners. Australians, Americans, British, Europeans. They knock the culture of this city off its feet and replace it with blond hair and blue eyes. They push people out of the box of chastity and humility and set them free into a world of underground booze and partying and mixing-of-the-sexes.

That's right, GASP. Be SHOCKED. This is a fine form of discrimination staring you in the face. Can you handle it's unadulterated consistency? Are you mad, furious, because you can make fun of your own race and other people shouldn't, that you can throw racial slurs if you're from the same race but that no one else should? Does it infuriate you that you have every right to criticize your own culture but others shouldn't, and yet they do?

Nobody has earned that right. Nobody is entitled to any kind of judgment or prejudice. Not anybody, and certainly not you, you Arab Asian Western infidel uneducated outcast leper ugly beggar skank whore son-of-a-nobody.

And yet..

History revolves around the same axis, it orbits around the same nucleus of hatred and looking-down-on-other-people.

Culture is beautiful. Songs have been sung about them, poems recited, books written, worlds fused. But to this city, there exists a fine line between the appreciation of beauty in culture, and the overdose of it.

Hate begets hate. The chicken begot the egg. The egg begot the chicken. Potatoe potah-toe. Same banana.

Are you a discriminator, or are you discriminated against?

The first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge that there IS a problem.

Hi. My name is Nessreen and I am a racist.