Black is Beautiful: Blackness and Desirability in SWANA

Amna Ali is the founder of the @Black Arabs Collective, a platform to share the stories and amplify the voices of Black Arabs.

After years of never speaking of the invisibility of the Black Arab communities and with the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, following the blood-curdling killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, a global solidarity movement is shifting the narrative on race and forcing societies across the world to reckon with their own racism.

With the conversation pertaining to race issues going global, we’re now finally witnessing a conversation about race in the Arab world.

But what does that really mean?

The SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region is taking too long to make amends for the erasure of blackness, which in turn led to a political vacuum where Afro-Arab issues should be. But it is no longer enough to be anti-racist. Now more than ever, the voices, issues, and political and cultural concerns of Black Arabs and North Africans need to be platformed.

Thus, to make sense of the complexities of Black experiences in Arabic and predominantly Muslim cultures, people must create platforms, cede their privilege and spaces to make room for Black voices.

I’m not ugly, I’m just Black…

As a third-culture kid, having a Somali father and a Yemeni mother and being born and raised in the UAE, I had a very tumultuous relationship with my Blackness. I was always othered in school for being Black.

At one point, I was the only Black non-Emirati student at a school of over 700 girls, where I was called racist names, made fun of, and treated blatantly differently than my Emirati and non-Black Arab peers. That became the norm for me. I started laughing at those jokes, got used to being perceived as less-than, and started using self-deprecating humor. Being the ugly girl was my normal.

As I grew older, I started dressing nicer and taking care of my appearance. In my last year of high school, I noticed more people started complimenting my looks but not in a way that is actually flattering to my beauty. These “compliments” were made to associate me with whiteness (or non-Blackness). I would get compliments on my soft hair and my “not typically Black” features. I would get asked if I’ve had a nose-job and get the back-handed compliment of “you’re not that dark. You’re not BLACK Black, you’re not that much darker than us”. People would give me that ole’ reliable “pretty for a Black girl”. My beauty was based on my proximity to them and what they deemed as beautiful: them. And that’s when it dawned on me; I’m not ugly, I’m just Black.

Living in a society that is unequivocally and unmistakably racist, I realized that my Blackness was what I was judged on. My Blackness was what made me ugly, unintelligent, and to not be taken seriously. Everywhere I looked, my skin color decided what I was. That was my reality.

Representation of Blackness in the Arab World

When I looked further and analyzed the world around me. I was bewildered by the extreme racism that was in the mainstream Arabic media. Contrary to popular opinion, “Arab” is not a singular race. Black Arabs, whether they’re a local minority or Black Arab immigrants, exist and reside all over SWANA. Arabic media’s depiction does not reflect this reality.

Being routinely cast into subservience, Blackness in Arabic media is almost exclusively used for comic relief or as a sexual commodity. Looking to mainstream Arabic media, representation of Black folks are racist depictions that painfully resemble Minstrel Shows in the American deep south back in the 19th century: depictions that only feed the racist, stereotypical narrative of what makes Black people inferior, unattractive, uneducated, dangerous, vulgar, ugly, lazy, sexually promiscuous and/or poor. For a very long time, this was seen as a normal occurrence. There was no social awareness of the degradation this depiction represented. The growth journey of Arabic social norms have moved much slower than those of the West and there has to be an understanding of the implication of the media in that problem. There’s a social responsibility that the cultural sector carries towards society. It is important to understand that this misrepresentation on mainstream TV or film screens has consequences off-screen.

Despite being part of society like any other group – regardless of how small of a minority they are - Black Arabs are offered no accurate representation. Black characters are almost never played by Black actors, not even in peripheral roles. Black characters carry racist stereotypes in their depictions and often create gross misrepresentations of the roles of Black Arabs in their communities.

Anti-Blackness & Social Culture

While I was writing this article, I engaged in conversations with many activist members of the Black Arabs community around the world. I quickly learned that within different Arabic societies and different Arabic households, from different nationalities, the experiences of Black folks were very similar.

During my conversation with Fatema Al Daii, an Omani girl who spent the last 6 years studying in the United States, we discussed how in Oman being Black or mixed with Black isn’t a small minority. Nevertheless, within the Omani society, it is very uncommon for marriages to happen between Black and non-Black individuals, and if those marriages were to happen, it is usually a Black man marrying a non-Black girl and not the other way around. Which speaks to the sexism that’s also interwoven within the Arabic society.

With traditional marriages being very popular in the region, Fatema described a typical conversation around a potential Black bride “she’s lovely, comes from a great family, well educated, has a great job… but she’s Black”. Her Blackness not only being mentioned last, but also framed as a disparagement.

When talking about the UAE, the country where I was born and raised, I had a very enlightening conversation with Ibtisam Tasnim, an African American who was raised in the UAE and had experienced life as an Emirati-Arabic speaking and Emirati-passing female around the same exact time, only in two different cities. We both spoke Emirati Arabic, the only difference was when I got asked the “where are you really from?” questions, my response was Somali Yemeni unlike hers.

The responses we respectively received were remarkably different. Girls would put on their best “Valley girl” accent and shriek in excitement, whereas I got a look of almost disappointment. They couldn’t fathom that I could sound Emirati, be well educated, not be “poor” as they liked to describe it. These polar opposite reactions are a clear indication of just the level of prejudice Arab societies carry towards Black Arabs.

Being considered “light skinned”, she recounts returning to Dubai after spending some time in India. Her reception home was marred by associates being unpleasantly surprised by the fact that her skin tone had darkened or that she had been tanning, and being surprised she wasn’t as upset as they were. They didn’t want her to enjoy her tanned skin, but they still deny they are racist.

“You can’t stand up for yourself, if you can’t advocate for yourself, you can’t ask for what you deserve, then there’s a problem there”. Colette Dalal Tchantcho, a half Kuwaiti-half Cameroonian woman currently living in Rome, expressed passionately. Having grown up in Kuwait and being much closer to her Kuwaiti culture, Colette very quickly realized that she wasn’t seen the way the rest of her non-Black Kuwaiti counterparts were. There was a clear difference when they got in trouble for being teenagers, she too felt like she had to be extra vigilant because she will be treated differently. She also talked about how we (as Black-Arab folk) have internalized the racial trauma that we have gone through and normalized it in our minds.

All three girls talked about how society told them they weren’t beautiful, in one way or another, by shaming, marginalizing or downright calling them inferior and ugly. The racial divide that lives within the Arabic society is very real, many don’t see it as such, but that’s because they choose to turn a blind eye to it. Our voice must be heard. We’re not ugly, we’re just black.