A few weeks ago, standing on the sidelines at soccer practice, I was doing the mom-chat thing with a woman I’d only just met. She said she’d lived in Abu Dhabi for about seven years, but was thinking of moving back to the UK before her older daughter started high school.
“I know it’s too early to think about it,” the mother said, laughing, “but things happen, and I wouldn’t want her to end up marrying an Arab, after all.”
Our kids were playing indoors to beat the heat, and scattered along the sidelines with us were a smattering of dads in dishdashas and moms in abayas, and some other Western parents. No one heard this woman’s comment and she seemed unconcerned about what she’d just said. I looked at her, trying to figure out if she were joking (she wasn’t).
“I can imagine,” I said. “I suppose somewhere right now there’s an Arab mom saying she doesn’t want her son to marry an English girl, what with her being all independent and wanting to drive and stuff.” (Women in the UAE can drive; I was just making a point.) I smiled, so she’d think I was making a joke (I wasn’t).
“Huh,” she said. “I’d never thought of it that way.”
Exactly, I thought.
Then, when we were driving home from soccer, my younger son said “the thing is that the Arab kids just don’t want to try, it’s like they don’t care.” And as if there were something in the air that day, at dinner, my older son said “all the Indian kids think they’re so smart, but they’re not.”
It was a veritable trifecta of casual racism, and I wish I could say that it was unusual, but it’s not. Or rather, I hear these sorts of tossed-off comments in grown-up conversations, but I’m noticing that my kids are starting to mouth the same phrases.
In this cosmopolitan city, where I hear four, five, six languages being spoken as I walk down the street, I’m also hearing my kids be way too comfortable talking about “them.”
Our kids spent their early years in New York, the original melting pot; they’ve always gone to school with people who look, talk, eat, and dress differently than they do. And in many ways moving to Abu Dhabi has helped them (all of us) to deepen our sense of being citizens of the world.
But before we moved here, I don’t remember my kids talk about “those people” are like this, or “they all” do that, and despite (or perhaps because of ) its international population, Abu Dhabi’s stratified society seems to foster these sorts of generalizations. When you look around, it’s too easy to say oh, all white-collar workers are Western; laborers are Pakistani or South Asian; shop clerks are Filipino; and the Ferraris idling at the stop lights belong to Emiratis. Sometimes it seems you could paint Abu Dhabi with stripes of different colors and the colors would never, ever mix.
Abu Dhabi isn’t the only place where racism is a problem, of course, but it’s the first place I’ve lived where people from every demographic seem comfortable talking about “them” (whoever “they” may be). It surprises me that here, of all places, my husband I have to explain to the kids why it’s a problem to describe an entire group on the basis of one person’s behavior, or even to assume that any group can be described as a single entity.
Us. Them. Such small words but they create such big walls.
I have to say, I hope that woman’s daughter does marry an Arab.
How do you talk to your children about racism, particularly the subtler forms that are sometimes hard to see?
This is an original post for the World Mom’s Blog by Mannahattamamma in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Read more at mannahattamamma.
Mannahattamamma (UAE)
After twenty-plus years in Manhattan, Deborah Quinn and her family moved to Abu Dhabi (in the United Arab Emirates), where she spends a great deal of time driving her sons back and forth to soccer practice. She writes about travel, politics, feminism, education, and the absurdities of living in a place where temperatures regularly go above 110F.
Deborah can also be found on her blog, Mannahattamamma.
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You provide an interesting window into your experiences in Abu Dhabi. With my kids in the US, we notice features that make people look different, and we talk about how we’re all the same inside. And also, that we’re all capable of doing great things, no matter what we look like.
Something that I notice, here, in the US is when I hear someone reference “Mexicans” when talking about labor workers. Not all labor workers are Hispanic, and on top of that, not all Hispanic people are from Mexico. It reminds me that we still have a far way to go to when it comes to wiping out ignorance.
By the way — to my daughters who may be reading this one day when they are grown up — marry someone you love. I don’t care what they look like, where they’re from, or what religion they practice or don’t practice. As long as you are both happy together and respectful of other people in the world.
Jen 🙂
What a beautiful message to your daughters Jen! I wish my mom had the same outlook on life. Your girls are very lucky to have such a wonderful mom! 🙂
what a lovely message, jen! in Abu Dhabi, I see the same thing: “expats” are generally white, American or European; and “workers” are South Asian or Sri Lankan. And yet technically, we’re all “expats” — or all “workers.”
Living in NYC, as you noticed when you were here, we don’t deal with much racism in day to day living, since it is such a melting pot. Interestingly enough, at school the kids went through a lesson of where the described their friend’s physique (similar to what Jen was saying) amougst other things, one of the descriptions they discussed was skin color…not race (by the way there are children of every race and religion in his class… And he is in the minority as one of the 3 Jewish kids). Soon after this lesson, my husband was watching golf on tv and talking about Tiger Woods. My son said “is that the chocolate man playing golf?”. To him it was literally a description of the man, amongst other men on the screen. I decided not to correct him at that moment, because it was not meant in a negative way. To him it was an observation and description. I tried to explain to him later on, that even though I know he didn’t mean it in a bad way, it isn’t really polite to describe someone by their skin color and others might not take it the way that it is meant. Children are not born racists, they learn it from those around them. I hope that by growing up surrounded by, socializing and playing with kids of all races, nationalities and religions, they will never learn it…it worked for me.
I think that’s an important distinction: when young people are being simply descriptive (that person is chocolate, that person has kinky hair, etc) they don’t attach any value to the descriptors. The value (and judgements) come later…all from the grownups who supposedly “know better.” And I, like you, hope that surrounding my kids with a mix of people and cultures, they will grow up with an awareness of what connects us all.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. I love how you are focusing on the views of other places to help enlighten us. Many people have such a limited view because of their religion, or their homeland, or from their parents and it really is unfortunate. I myself am from a suburb of Boston, MA which is more of a “Salad Bowl” than a melting pot. In the city, racism is not really an issue as there are so many ethnicity within it, however in the suburbs it is still a prominent issue.
This may be a bit controversial, but I believe racism still exists so strongly because we put so much emphasis on not being racist. We tread carefully so that people won’t think us racist, but by doing so open doors to those beliefs anyways. In fact while I was attending school years ago, I was chastised for saying that I saw no difference between people of a different race. This statement, apparently, was considered racist because I was not acknowledging the differences. It seems to be a catch-22. You can’t ignore race because then you are racist, but you also can’t identify it because that is also racist.
Working for the company I do, I have a wonderful opportunity to travel. When my daughter is older, at the moment she is two, I want to take her with me on these trips so she can view the world through her own eyes. She can make her own thoughts, her own assumptions. I want to raise her as a worldly child who can view a person for their merits, not their skin color. It is only a step as I cannot prevent the influence of society, but I can give her the experience to learn about the world. It is my hope that this will eliminate some of the ignorance that consumes so many.
Again, I loved this post, and thoroughly enjoyed your perspective. Thank you for sharing this.
There’s a book called “Nurtureshock”, I don’t know if you can get it where you live, but it has a whole chapter on racism. It talks about how childen as young as two or three automatically prefer to play with children wearing the same colour shirts. We are naturally programmed to prefer people who resemble ourselves, and identify with them, while considering those who are different to be “other”.
The book says that this conflicts with the usual strategy of non-racist parents, which is to simply not point out or discuss differences (the whole “maybe if I don’t mention that his friend is black, he won’t notice” strategy. Apparently the majority of white children have never had a conversation with their parents about racism, because the parents say that they are worried about CREATING racism by discussing differences.
It’s tough.
Another interesting thing mentioned in the book is this little fact: apparently there is MORE racism in a school with high levels of diversity than in a school with low levels of diversity. When there are lots of Indian kids, and lots of Black kids, and lots of HIspanic kids, they tend to hang out with each other. Indian kids hang out with the other Indian kids, and so on. But low levels of diversity force the odd-child-out to mingle with children of another race.
And it’s totally true – I grew up in the Caribbean and our school was very diverse. There was very little racism, mostly because there was a zero tolerance policy (one time a classmate called his friend’s skin colour “dirty” and he was sent to the principal’s office immediately) but the Venezuelan kids hung out together, the Brazilians hung out together, and my close friends were all Caucasian English-speaking. If anyone had asked us why we hung out with people of our own nationality or race, though, we wouldn’t have claimed racism. I had no problem with the Venezuelan kids, and the Jewish kids were some of the most popular in our class. Instead we would have simply cited a common bond – a shared nationality, a shared language, a shared culture. We hung out with the people most like ourselves, not because we despised the others but because we had less in common. Given the variety, we tended to choose ourselves.
But when I moved back to Canada, all the white kids in my class looked alike to me – I was so used to relying on race to tell one kid from another than I wasn’t practiced at picking out minor differences in a sea of Caucasian faces. So one of my closest friends (and still a best friend today) was the ONE Indian kid in my class – the one kid I could recognize, and the one kid who shared my experience of living internationally.
The best way to eradicate racism is to mix it up – force them to interact and find similarities amongst the different races. When kids discover that they can have the same interests as a kid of a difference race, the colour barrier begins to drop….