Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 09:21:27 +0300
Subject: Re: My culture, right or wrong?


WF:

> race is an element that can not be ignored. A Muslim
> coming from Lebanon who possess more European features
> will be more readily accepted then a Muslim coming
> from Pakistan, whose origin is clearly defined by his
> features and skin colour.

Are you talking about Muslims? Nationalities? Or raced bodies?

Rana Kabbani (Syrian-born journalist and writer) writing of her experiences
as a PhD student at Cambridge in the 1980s: [the examiner appointed to judge
the work I spent three years researching] despised women so thoroughly that
he battled to bar them from the college where he was a Fellow. Foreigners
--particularly dark ones--came second to females on the scale of his
disdain. When I went for my viva voce examination, he stared hard at me,
then gasped in exasperation: "Oh you're white! We thought you would be
black!"' (1994 preface to the new edition of _Europe's Myths of Orient_).

Kabbani uses this as an opportunity to vent against Western/Christian
misogyny in general, rather than British racism, which is perhaps
explainable in terms of her overall project to reject 'the patriarchal
legacy of race'. But what about the perplexity the examiner reveals? Is
Kabbani's 'whiteness', for him, only a superficial marker, and could the
same be said of her anticipated 'blackness'? Why then is he exasperated? Is
it because Kabbani's skin upsets (or mocks/threatens) his view of racial
difference (foretold by her name)? Or is it, more invidiously, because it is
not what he would like to examine? Either way, race here IS a question of
personal and cultural convictions. Kabbani is only white or black (or
female) in the viva voce, in a situation where her future is at stake.

It would be weird if the guy went away thinking: Ah well, some blacks are
white, after all .... Otoh, perhaps it wouldn't. Think of how British
comedian Ali G passing as black *becomes* black ... Do these two examples
say anything to the idea that 'race' is not only about skin (chroma, as
Spivak once put it) and origins?

WF is right on, I think, about features and skin in situations where
identity is a matter of the most obvious, the most visible, the most
incriminating. What Immigration officials, and law enforcement officers,
notice first is always signs of those differences ... but in terms of some
stark original difference?

Piers Smith



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