Introduction
The killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the streets protesting against police brutality in the United States. But this incident, and sadly many others like it in recent memory, forced issues of structural violence, racial injustice and racialised collective precarity to the forefront of a global conversation. The Middle East has not been an exception, and the subject of race and its relevance to minorities and âothersâ residing in the region has attracted notable attention by scholars and activists alike.
Up until now, few works on the Middle East have discussed race as central to their analysis. The rationale for this special issue in Ethnic and Racial Studies is to remedy this shortcoming by extending the critical scholarship on race and racial subordination to the region's states and societies. Crucially, how does race interact with and confront other categories of identity, such as gender, religion, sect and nationality? What can a consideration of racialization reveal about structures of oppression in the Middle East and evolving forms of belonging and dispossession? Race is conventionally taken to denote blackâwhite or Asian-white binaries ubiquitous in the political and socio-cultural maps that constitute the global âNorthâ. While these binaries do not translate seamlessly to the cartography of the Middle East, the implications of what racial hierarchy-making do to the human body, and what they say about political systems, are highly relevant. Adopting race as the focus of enquiry allows us as critical scholars to unpack what we are really talking about when we talk about difference in the context of the Middle East: the reproduction and resilience of power and the insidious, harmful mutations of identity-based discrimination in unequal societies.
Outside of the context of the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict, most studies of the Middle East commonly presume that the race signifier is reserved for the juxtaposition of âBlackâ versus âWhiteâ identities so prevalent elsewhere in the world and to which the Arab, Persian and Turkish worlds count themselves as exterior. Race, or thinking about race, may have become ânaturalizedâ in Western culture since the discourse, ideology and presuppositions of race are a European or âEurocolonial inventionâ that emerged in the late eighteenth century (Wolfe 2016, 17). With some notable exceptions the same cannot be said about contemporary scholarship on the politics of the modern Middle East.1 This does not mean, however, that the Middle East is immune or exempt from racism or the practices of racial inferiorisation.
The aim in this special issue is to animate conversations about race, identity, belonging and citizenship in the Middle East going forward. According to a survey conducted by the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI), which scanned articles published in over one hundred peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and 2019, research on the subject of race is scant at best. The majority of the around forty articles were published in the past two decades and focused predominantly on Egypt, Sudan, Turkey, Iran and the Maghreb, with none on race in Arab Gulf states.2
Why talk about race at all in the context of the Middle East? The articles collected in this issue jointly respond to and expand upon the ways in which the politics of race and processes of racialization constitute practices of power in the region. The objective is to critically identify and examine how the treatment of non-majoritarian identities in the Middle East bears resemblance to racist practises of inferiorisation that denigrate âothersâ elsewhere in the world as aberrant, their bodies as commodities or as âunworthyâ, whether they are African Americans in the United States; Aborigines in settler societies like Canada or Australia; or Muslims confronted with hate speech or Islamophobia in parts of the European continent. By bringing the concept of race to bear on the political, social and economic worlds of Middle East states, the goal is to help make better sense of the inherited and, and in some cases, novel obstacles faced by racial and other minorities. That said, however, we do not take the position that the Middle East is somehow exceptional in either its poor track record on race nor its denial of persistent racism at different levels of state or society. Following Toledano, whose work on the history of slavery in the Ottoman-Islamic world in the nineteenth century constitutes one of the core texts in an emergent literature, the goal here is neither about âassigning blame nor about absolving from guiltâ (2007, 1).
Racism functions through political, cultural and religious/sectarian relations, technocratic methods of governance that perpetuate human categorization and everyday forms of discrimination. Racial politics cannot therefore be abstracted from the distinct contexts in which it arises, evolves and persists. Directing scholarly attention to race exposes forms of exclusion, disenfranchisement and socio-economic inequality that is otherwise neglected by the literature. While racism is disempowering, identifying and speaking about racist practices constitutes a step toward greater understanding as well as policy recommendations toward group empowerment and inclusive political representation.
The articles included in this special issue collectively show how racism traverses fluid, ambiguous and contingent spaces within and across sub-state, state, regional or international spaces. The use of race as an expression of group power and as technologies of surveillance and governance is not new. But exploring race as an iteration of power in critical terms has been neglected in studies of the historiography, politics and sociology of states and societies in the Middle East. Our work here is invested with a concern of the diverse expressions of racial politics and racialization â institutional and cultural racialization, silent forms of othering, the reproduction of âwhitenessâ, the hybrid self-expressions of personhood that racial stereotypes seek to erase.
To see how racial categories impart distinct experiences on peoples of the Middle East, consider how in the US, Arabs are classified as white, but not the âright kindâ of white (Gualtieri 2009). In the geography of the Middle East, the visuality and politics of âwhitenessâ has been transplanted as superiority, reproducing structures of power witnessed in the North American or European contexts. The prevalence of racial hierarchies, institutional neglect and discrimination or hate crimes targeting black Arabs, non-Arab minorities, as well as non-Muslim migrant workers and indigenous peoples requires our scholarly attention perhaps more now during our tumultuous times than ever before.
Racial injustice and social boundary-making in the Middle East plays out today through blatantly discriminatory legal institutional codes, as well as mundane and quotidian everyday practices that are underreported or impossible to document. It is notable that the death of George Floyd, who was killed after the police were called by an Arab-American store owner in Minneapolis, triggered an emergent conversation led by human rights activists and feminists defending the rights of Black men and women in the Arab world â a previously taboo subject. Notably, in a poignant column, Bahira Amin wrote, âWhen Black people are attacked in the Arab world and we refuse to see it, that is not fundamentally different to when a police officer kneels on the neck of a Black man in the USâ (2020).
Anti-Blackness in the Arab world stands as a collective failure of human rights and poses a serious challenge to aspirations for Muslim democracy. For example, the kafala contract system, which activists have long decried as indentured servitude, in many Gulf states is symptomatic of a modern-day master and slave dialectic. The kafala ties a migrant labourer's residency and right to work to their employment sponsor (kafeel). The system affords few or no legal rights to workers, meaning employers evade accountability and workers frequently suffer sexual and physical violence, poor conditions and little hope of escape. Despite the global Covid-19 pandemic and the economic hardship that has deepened in Lebanon, the kafala system there has endured, with migrant workers from countries such as Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia employed in the care sector, which is stigmatized by many Lebanese. Sudanese migrants who fled the genocide in Sudan seeking safe haven in Egypt suffer harassment, violence and neglect by state institutions. The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated already appalling conditions for African migrants and asylum seekers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where it was reported that as many as thousands of Horn of Africa migrants are held in detention centres with inadequate rations or fresh water and are subjected to physical violence (Brown and Zelalem 2020). At the same time, the chronic malaise of anti-Blackness in the Arab world is not the only form of racism that plagues states and societies. Other longstanding cases of racism persist, notably the marginalization of Kurdish peoples to various degrees and intensities in the four states they inhabit since the end of the First World War in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Whilst such discrimination may often not be reported or treated as racially motivated in the Middle East, the personal harm inflicted, and their social and political consequences operate in similar ways to the longstanding experience of what is commonly understood as racial discrimination in other parts of the world.
While turning our gaze to this research agenda, it is important to avoid conflating the diverse and variable experiences of Black peoples into a single narrative of victimhood. The Black experience is contingent on legal status (citizen versus migrant or refugee), class, gender, language and religion across the region, and we must be careful not to dismiss or ignore the agency and subjectivities of Black Arab citizens, migrants and Sub-Saharan refugees.
