Oppression Everywhere Every Time All at Once
later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere
- Warshan Shire, Where Does It Hurt?
Politics
Permissible Darkness and Oppress-able Blackness
Up till 2022, Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, was the tourism center for Africans, Nigerians in particular. Not only was it a thing of prestige to go to Dubai regardless of the purpose of one’s visit, it was also relatively easy to get the needed visa. Celebrities, social media influencers, businessmen, slay queens, young hustlers, old money folks, they all, at one point, visit Dubai if only to share pictures of Burj Khalifa on social media and earn the envy of peers. In short, Dubai was the haven, the promised land of most Nigerians. These all changed in late 2022 when, following a series of criminal activities by Nigerians in UAE, Dubai placed a visa ban on all citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, and 18 other African countries (Dada).
They also rejected the applications of those who had requested for visas even before the ban was put into effect (Eze). What’s more, the airports started harassing and detaining Africans who already had their visas issued and had flown to UAE; most of these immigrants had their passports seized and were left stranded in the airports (Iwayemi). Worst still, a Nigerian lady called Dinchi Lar was arrested and sentenced to jail for one year for taking pictures of the ill treatment of prospective African immigrants and posting it on Twitter alongside an SOS message (Sulaimon). It didn’t stop there. Nigerians who had been living in Dubai and had scored a life for themselves soon started facing the threat of mass deportation. The threat solidified into reality and, soon after, governments of African countries had to repatriate some of their citizens from UAE. In October 2022, the federal government of Nigeria had to repatriate a total of 542 stranded Nigerians (Eromosele).
There is a lot to be angry about this thread of events. But, on the flip side, there really is nothing remarkably new and shocking enough to spark genuine revolt and indignation. After all, these are diplomatic affairs rooted in political understandings and foreign agreements made by political juggernauts and leviathans whose lofty lives cannot be compared to citizens benumbed by the hardship of daily living. Besides, isn’t Africa used to being treated with such backhandedness by other nations? What right does the continent have to complain when it does not exactly have its own shit together and cannot be reckoned with globally. Like a friend likes to put it, we are the world’s pariah, but not in a self-sacrificial, societally ostracized Sula kind of way but in a you-did-this-to-yourselves manner.
The practice of diplomatically punishing collectives for the crimes of a few (sometimes petty, youthful fuckery crimes) has been absorbed by the society as normal and sometimes necessary to maintain the peace in a nation and control its immigration in and out flows. What’s more, there is a politics of dispensability that comes with the admission of immigrants into countries with a field of play that is technologically, commercially, and maybe politically empowered. Dispensability – you are everything we need until you are needed for nothing. Right about the time when Dubai in UAE was rebranding itself as a powerhouse for luxury and glamor – a Middle-Eastern Las Vegas, African (especially Nigerian) politicians, socialites with embezzled funds and ill-gotten wealth started making it a center for lavishly spending their truckloads of bad money; they bought (and still buy) deluxe houses and apartments in the heart of the city, establish boutiques selling top-tier clothing made by international luxury fashion companies and buy cars that have yet to even find a foothold anywhere else in the world. As it is, over 800 properties in Dubai have been directly linked to Nigerian politicians and other politically exposed people and these properties are worth over 146 billion naira (Page). 130 of those property assets are said to belong to Nigerian ex-governors and senators (How 130 Dubai Assets Were Traced To Nigerian Ex-Governors, Senators | Sahara Reporters).
Even more, Dubai unabashedly became the seat of money laundering and the haven for internet fraudsters (Yahoo-yahoos as Nigerians call them) who rent hotel extravagant penthouses from where they share glittery posts on social media and are ushered into every store in Dubai while going on their regular shopping sprees. Ismaila Mustapha aka Mompha and Ramon Abbas popularly known as Hushpuppi are two known Nigerian socialites who fall in this category. While the former has only been accused of allegedly engaging in money laundering, the latter is a convicted felon currently serving time in the Unites States for transnational multi-million dollar worth of online scams and money laundering (Augoye; Bisset). The arrest and conviction of Hushpuppi, Dubai’s favorite shopaholic, disrupted the illusion of invisibility and immunity associated with big-time, boss-level scammers like Hushpuppi, but it did nothing to stop the prevalence of rumors about African celebrities who become porta potties and engage in acts of analingus, coprophilia, peegasm, bestiality etc. to fund their lavish lifestyles in Dubai (Odozi). In essence, it can be said that a good percentage of Dubai’s economic standing and commercial reputation was, for the longest time, boosted by the murky undercover activities of Africa’s crazy filthy rich. It would, however, seem that too much of the shady businesses done by these money-generating and money-spending crazy hustlers are seeing the light of day hence they have become dispensable to the development of Dubai. Not that their shrieks at the magnificent sight of Burj Khalifa won’t be missed, but hey, the loud noise of the new year drone light shows at the skyscape can easily make up for that.
Buried beneath all the burdening rhetoric of diplomacy and commercial exigencies, one would wonder if the expulsion of Africans from UAE in such unsavory and demeaning manner is hemmed with an underlay or fringe of racism. I mean, the Emiratis are Arabs, right? They are Middle Easterners who are all too well familiar with different tenors of oppression in the society. Based on their religion, skin color, accents, and social ideologies, they have received their fair share of discrimination and fetishization by Europeans, Americans, and other Earthlings. Shouldn’t they share a sense of racial solidarity with black people, Africans? Our racial affinity and lived experiences of oppression, wasn’t it why they opened their doors to Africans in the first place? Why should the category of race be the same reason they are now closing the parlors of their economically flourishing cities to us? Questions like these can be answered in a heartbeat: Yes, UAE did what it did to Africa because it believes itself racially superior and nationally more cultured than any African country. But these questions are more nuanced and they, for all purposes, need to be subjected to critical examination.
This Bridge Called My Back, a popular book of adagials about race, class, and gender by and mostly for women of color,edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga does the work of parsing out the complex dynamics of oppression that swings like a pendulum from one society of color to another. In one of the forewords to the second edition published in 1983, Moraga acknowledges the need to “speak much more directly to the relations between women and men of color” and induct a “movement capable of spanning borders of nation and ethnicity” (Anzaldua and Moraga). While the subject matter focus of the book is directed at women and approaches its themes using the mode of Third World feminism, some of the contributors make provoking inquiries into the tenuous, often non-reprimanded forms of implicit bias and exercises of power that disrupt the oneness that should otherwise be cultivated among hypervisible racialized groups in America and beyond. The very first section of the book – “Roots of our Radicalism” – is preluded with a complex epidermal schema that goes beyond the black-white binary that we are wont to reflexively frown at: “We introduce to you the “color problem” as it was first introduced to us: “not white enuf, not dark enuf”, always up against a color chart that first got erected far outside our families and our neighborhoods, but which invaded them both with systematic determination” (Anzaldua and Moraga 5).
While the female contributors largely present the contradictions of being neither black nor white as a spectral condition that breeds the problems of “self-abnegation, the silence, the constant threat of cultural obliteration” (Anzaldua and Moraga 5), they also do not shield the realities of colored in-betweenness and the consequent performance of passing (peep Caucasia) from the longed-for privileges it affords. While contributors in the first quarter of the book rhetorize their personal experiences with having ambiguous that worked for and against them, the book begins tilting towards shifty and uncomfortable conversations about how oppression is gauged, measured, and accorded thresholds based on individual races and ethnic affiliations. The measurement of this oppression inadvertently becomes a determinant of which marginalized group has more power over other marginalized groups. Mitsuye Yamada recalls the grievance of a white student who could not fathom why Asian Americans would strongly lay claim to oppression in America in the same breath as Black Americans, Chicanos, or American Indians. The student said, “It made me angry. Their anger made me angry, because I didn’t even know the Asian Americans felt oppressed. I didn’t expect their anger” (Anzaldua and Moraga 35). Being a Japanese national, Yamada was aware of the solidarity with whiteness that she is expected to uphold and how this is a direct result of the seeming low stakes associated with the oppression of Asian diasporans in America. It is due to this supposed low-staked oppressiveness of Asians by whites that the connection of Asians (especially East Asians) to the Americans to the white folks is more accentuated in discourses about racial discrimination. It might be for this reason that former political candidate Andrew Yang seemed to have more said about his universal basic income campaign policy than his Asian-ness.
Away from the Asian American example, Barbara Cameron in “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian from the Reservation” boldly reflects on and polemicizes how third-world people implicitly measure the amount of oppression meted out to them by white powers in order to decide for themselves how much privilege and power they have over other racialized groups. She does a good job of calling out her complicity and those of many other radical activists in the messy dialectic of fighting racial oppression despite being racially oppressive to their fellas so I consider it important to quote her verbatim:
Racism is not easy for me to write about because of my own racism toward other people of color, and because of a complex set of “racisms” within the Indian community… Racism among third-world people is an area that needs to be discussed and dealt with honestly. We form alliances loosely based on the fact that we have a common oppressor, yet we do not have the commitment to talk about our own fears and misconceptions about each other (49).
Also, in Helen Barolini’s Umbertina published in 1979, the measurement of oppression and its effects was given a generational outlook. The shades and forms of oppression faced by Umbertina, Marguerite, and Tina differed based on epochal changes and periodic receptibility. Umbertina, with her heavy Italian accent and rurally imbued maternal values, could not get a house for her and her family to stay in while on their emigration journey but Marguerite, part American, part Italian, part feminist, could oscillate between two worlds and even tend to the more pressing concerns of mental wellbeing, sex, and desire. Tina, who is Italian yet all but Italian, could afford to feed off the aesthetic sensibilities of Rome while pondering existential questions. This is quite cliché and reductive but it’s fact nonetheless. While the struggles of each female character in the story is very valid, Barolini, as she reveals in her interview, with MELUS’s Dorothée von Huene Greenberg that establishing the generational divide between the ladies is to show their different conceptions of ethnic identity and how conceptions affect their femininely oriented pursuits of happiness (Dorothée von Huene Greenberg and Barolini). What Umbertina considers happiness is something that Tina and her sister would frown at. Relatedly, Marguerite romanticizes (rather than identifies with) Umbertina’s personage as “elementary”, imbued with “primitive strength” and toughness, but Umbertina’s constant attempt to be a proper girl-wife might reveal otherwise, especially in the modern feminist context. The temporal dissociation of generations’ understanding of ethnic identity is another reason why Africans and Arabs might not foster any feeling of racial solidarity in the 21st century.
Beyond This Bridge and Umbertina, Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus presents an example of how oppression has a measured tone which can then facilitate a power dynamic between the less oppressed and the more oppressed (at least, as it relates to white power and presence). In his first phone conversation with Brenda, Neil Klugman, the main character of the story, he answers her question “what do you look like?” with “I am dark” (Roth). The question that immediately follows from Brenda is, “Are you a Negro?” Neil says no, and Brenda asks again, “What do you look like?” It appears that, to Brenda, being Negro is a summative look in and of itself, one that can be explained by reason of not only the skin color but the racial affiliation. To be a negro is not just to be dark (anyone can be), it is to have a summarizable personality and outlook that has little nuance and can thus be immediately stamped into a befitting category of oppressive standards. You could be dark but not black. You could be dark and white and classy and privileged and racially acceptable but not black. This distinction between permissible darkness and oppress-able blackness is what informs Brenda’s treatment of Carlota who is specifically denoted as a black negro despite being Navaho-faced.
This idea of an invisible yet operational measurements of racial oppression translate as a viable reason for the disconnect between the racial affinity between the Arabs in UAE and Africans. How much of an ethnic bond can we say we share considering the fact that black people, Africans in this context, have been subjected to a level of non-adulterated, clear-as-moonlight, explicit, racially centered forms of discriminations by the western world? How can be racially affined if the Arabs have a non-contestable proximity to whiteness (in all its ramifications) that has yielded the concept of orientalism as we have it and has caused Arabs to have it better with white people than blacks? Despite their sizable vilification in the hands of American society members, the Arabs do feel whiter than Africans and, by implication, they feel better, more superior, more racially equipped to mete out diplomatic punishment to African nations whose citizens have been naughty, in fact, they feel in the right place to decided what naughtiness is permitted, when the naughtiness should begin, and when it should stop. This is not to say that oppression is measurable, or one is less than another and this is not to ignore the historical contexts of 9/11 and attacks against Islamization that has persistently heightened the oppression of Middle Eastern countries at the hands of Americans and Europeans. However, this is merely to point out that the liminalities, in-betweens, and gradients on the color spectrum which are often ignored due to discursively declared polarities of blackness and whiteness do matter in conversations about racism and racialized diplomatic actions/policies.
Also, this presented opinion nudges at the fact that even in a contextual situation where whiteness is not a mentioned character, it still finds its way in. Take for instance this comedy clips by Murahd Shawki who was spitting out facts about how Egyptians perceive themselves as North Africans but not black. Being North African sounds kinda black but it is definitely not black. Reason? “White people had to start somewhere… Maybe I am just how white people used to look. Maybe I’m the prototype. The Ford Model-T of Honkies.” Shawki establishes his affinity to blackness still but makes it one of choice, one of dispensable diplomacy, one that reveals his desire to compete in the Olympics of paleness. “I’d love to be black, but I just don’t think the team wants me. Cuz if I say I am black, people say… you are not black! But if I say I’m not black, people say, “what are you ashamed of being black?” What race do I have to be to walk away from this conversation? As if going on to answer his own choice-riddled question, he adds, “North Africa sounds kinda black but I have a very pale skin tone and Egypt is right there by Greece and Greek food is just Arab food with too much fuckin’ yogurt on it, anyway.”
As much as I savored the humor in the comedic rendering, I couldn’t help but wonder why despite asserting his positionality as African, he couldn’t see blackness as a ship to belong to and instead preferred to sail all the way to Greece in Europe and then conveniently land in the Mediterranean. If we are all from Africa as he claimed, then why not settle with the identity configuration of blackness which is what Africa is racially identified as? Why see it alienate from it and prefer to flip the side of the coin, identifying with the part of Africa that was once white? Why make blackness and all its racial implications (even the unpleasant ones) a to be or not to be question? It is clear that the Middle East’s tonal proximity to whiteness is desirable even if it means strawing out the thoroughly black aesthetics one possesses and using multiethnic identifications as a way to lay claim to white power and privileges. Dubai’s sudden dissociation from African countries might have been a smart diplomatic move but the very fact that they could do it without so much as making space for the solidarities that bind both worlds show that they have, by reason of their ethnic in-betweenness, picked a side and that side tilts more to affirming their interest in obtaining Euro-western validation. Like the case with Brenda and Neil, the problem is not with being dark, it is with being black.