I have an African-American friend who spent a year in Amman studying Arabic. When I first got to know him, he gave me a list of all the things he hated about Jordan. The most prominent item on his list was racism.

I used to think that Jordanians are generally not racist, that we accept people regardless of their skin color, and that we do not discriminate based on that. But my friend’s list was an eye-opener to me, because it showed me what a black person actually felt while being in Jordan. You can’t know these things unless you are in someone’s shoes like that, as a non-Black person you are not sensitive to them because you simply don’t have to face them.

My friend told me he had never been so conscious of his skin color, of being “black,” as much as when he was in Jordan. He told me stories about random guys calling him “Abu Samra” and laughing, about people’s insistence that he was not from the U.S.A but from somewhere else “originally.” No really, originally, where are you from? — that’s what they used to ask him.

I was really shocked, especially when he mentioned that most Jordanians counter-attacked any critique of their country with a “but America brought blacks from Africa and made them slaves!.” I can imagine that it was as if my friend’s being black was the be-all and end-all of his humanity. That was how people defined him.

I find black people beautiful. My best friends in kindergarten were black orphans. Their names were Ward (boy) and Gulnar (girl). Perhaps because I interacted with black people at such an early age that I have developed a profound liking for them.

When I was younger, I kept telling my mother that I want to marry a black man. She usually dismissed the idea, like she did with plenty of my unusual whims. But at one point, it got serious and she got serious. She found it unacceptable that I would even think it possible for me to be with a black man.

My father joined my mother’s side, and I just could not understand why they had that attitude. So I kept harassing them with religious quotes and whatnot about equality, but they weren’t very affected. I knew I would not end up with a black man (because, how many black men are there in Jordan? 5?), but the idea so outraged me that I mentioned my fantasy to them whenever I got the chance just to prove they did not act out what they believed.

I think the situation in Jordan is similar. You have people telling you they do not discriminate, but their behaviors show the opposite. Read the following excerpts from an article about adoption in Jordan in Al Rai:

واشارت ان هناك فئات من الاطفال لا تقبل الاسر الاردنية على احتضانهم ويكونون بالعادة يعانون من امراض معينة تحتاج لعلاج او اعاقات معينة نتيجة الظروف التي وضعوا فيها اضافة الى الاطفال ذوي البشرة السوداء الذين ان لم تحتضنهم الاسر - غير العربية - فانهم سيبقون طوال عمرهم بالمؤسسات .
…
وهؤلاء الاطفال الذين لم يتم احتضانهم سيبقون في مؤسسات الرعاية الاجتماعية طوال عمرهم ، اذ ان الاسر العربية تميل الى احتضان الاطفال حديثي الولادة والذين لا يعانون من اية مشاكل إضافة إلى اختيارهم الأطفال ذوي البشرة البيضاء .

If you can’t read Arabic, the quotes say that Arab families that want to adopt Jordanian babies refrain from adopting black children and prefer to adopt whites. On the contrary, foreign families do not mind adopting black Jordanian children, or those with “problems.”

If that is not racism, I don’t know what is! I was heartbroken just by reading that. The irony in the situation is that these families probably cannot have children of their own, and YET they discriminate against children based on their skin color. These families would rather wait than readily adopt a black child. If not lucky enough to be picked up by foreign families, black children remain in government-operated, impersonal foster homes until they reach adulthood.

I just wonder who could be so evil, so low, as to be racist to a child. Now I ask you: How could people who so desperately want to love a child be picky about skin color? How could they break a child’s heart? No wonder Ward and Gulnar were orphans. Do you think they didn’t know why they were not adopted?

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under Culture Arabia, Jordan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.