I see color - Thoughts of a brown guy

A couple of days ago, I watched this Netflix documentary called “Hello Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea”. It’s made by a comedian called Chelsea Handler and her take on “white privilege”. At first, I was a bit skeptical, I kept thinking “Oh, here’s another show done by a white person trying to understand what it means to not be white and failing at it” and by the end of it I realized I was pretty much right. She was shooting in her fancy house, talking to a bunch of black people, some of them were as sceptical as me, she was also talking to this white dude who claims to be an expert on white privilege. It was entertaining to watch, to be honest, but there was this one sentence that really caught my attention “white people need to have this conversation with themselves more”. I personally have heard white people tell me "I haven't thought about my whiteness before", but I do think about whiteness.

I’m a person that is very conscious about racism and white privilege. I think about it a lot and I like to talk about it, but I could feel sometimes how awkward or uncomfortable some white people are when the topic is open. I just can’t help it. When a white person asks me “Is it safe to travel to AFRICA?” or says “I love Middle Eastern culture, I wish I could go to Arabia sometimes” or try to be controversial and ask me "What do you think of Israel?", those little sneaky devils. When I hear these things, I cringe and I get sarcastic. If I have the energy I try to elaborate, and if not then I just unmatch them on Tinder, because I don’t have time for that sh*t, and I'm not getting paid to educate you about your white privilege.

I never actually put a lot of thought about the issue. And it wasn’t until I started travelling and seeing the world, that I had my first taste of sweet old racism. At first, it’s shocking, then it becomes entertaining, then it becomes annoying until it turns into sadness. The first time I was discriminated against based on my nationality and/or the color of my skin, was when I was passing through immigration in an airport. Where the only question that was left to be asked by the officer was “boxers or briefs?”. And by the way it’s briefs, boxers are always in the way. I kept looking around me, realizing that everyone white person was passing normally and I was the one getting interrogated. I got used to it though, I don't mind the "random" security checks anymore, because I know that they're not random. I laugh when my white friends take out a stopwatch and count how many minutes I'd been interrogated when they only had seconds to get a stamp. I felt kind of important when my name was called in the Airport speakers though. Fun times.

I’m Egyptian, I’m African, I’m brown and I’m Muslim. The four elements that put some white people on guard. They either become very careful not to say anything offensive, or they just pretend that they “don’t see color” because “color doesn’t matter”. But let me break it you, my white friend, it pretty much does and you would be in some sort of denial if you think you don’t see color. Because everyone else does.

I see color because simply it’s affecting my life, my career, my future, and my plans. I used to work for this wonderful organization called AIESEC, it’s a youth leadership development organization, and I’m extremely grateful to it because it made me the man I am today. But, AIESEC tricked me, and I feel like I’ve been lied to for the past six years. Call me na?ve but let me give you context:

In Egypt, if you get good grades in high school, you either go ahead and study Engineering where you spend 5 years hating your life and then you graduate and hate your life even more, or you study medicine where you spend 7 years hating your life and then you graduate and also hate your life even more. So I thought let me hate my life a bit less and I went for Engineering. In my first semester, I joined AIESEC and it was pretty cool to be honest. I was very inspired by the dudes and dudettes there. They told me that “Leadership is the fundamental solution” and that “Youth have the ability to change the world” and that made my little brain get a bit excited. They also said something that really stayed with me - they said: “Nobody will hire you because of how good you are at school, they’ll hire you because of your leadership skills”. So then why am I wasting my time studying something that I hate if it won’t matter anyway? And I went ahead and changed majors and this was my first career change.

I took AIESEC seriously, I gave it my all and it gave me back. I learned a lot, I travelled a lot, I worked in international teams, I facilitated in conferences, I even made it to the global office which is a team of 25 people that lead the whole organization (it’s pretty big in AIESEC, I’m like a celebrity there, just ask about me) and after 6 years of incredible experiences, it was time to leave and lead my beautiful exciting life. But, here is where AIESEC tricked me, it showed me that a brown guy from Egypt can be the leader of white people from Europe and North America so I kind of thought that that was the “norm”, call me na?ve again.

I left and I started applying for jobs at companies like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Whatsapp, Microsoft and all of these fancy companies where previous alumni of AIESEC International work. The alumni were all kind enough to refer me to jobs there because we all know LinkedIn doesn’t work. But “surprisingly” I got rejected. And I got rejected a lot. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong, I had 13,000 versions of my resumé, I made sure to customize it to the job description, and I had the referrals. So, why was I getting rejected? I asked some of my friends that were also struggling with finding a decent job, and that was when it hit me. We all had two things in common, we weren’t white and we weren’t EU citizens and guess what? The other AIESEC alumni that have fancy jobs are white and EU citizens.

I was lucky enough to land an internship in a company called Electrolux in Sweden. And it’s been pretty cool but time is running out because my internship is almost done. So I started to apply again and again and again. In the past two months alone, I have applied to over a hundred opportunities, I did over twenty-five interviews and I’m still getting rejected. And the same is happening to my Mexican, Ethiopian, Brazilian, Egyptian, Indonesian and Turkish friends.

Call me na?ve for the third time, but I’m kind of disappointed. I know that the EU would prioritize taking care of EU citizens and I’d be totally okay with that and I would even “go back home to where I came from”. I just can’t help but think of the systematic struggle of the place where I came from is facing today. And I’m a believer that this struggle is caused by historic events and structural racism that was caused by the colonization of some of today’s EU countries to my region. I want to go back, do you think I like living in shitty weather and deal with cold people? No, I need the sun to make sure I stay brown. But I need to learn and grow first so I can go back and make it better. Is that too much to ask? Why aren't we looking at the effects of events that happened yesterday on what's happening today? I look at the idea of immigration and don't get me wrong, I'm all for immigration. But have you thought about how it's done? A country that is struggling with population growth decides that in order to sustain the economy they need more people. So, they say let's get people from outside and here is where it goes wrong. You see, they don't allow anyone in, they take the best of the best, the highest skills, the great background and they tell them that if they managed to work hard, pay taxes and stay for 5 or 10 years then "you're one of us". And that person becomes one of them and forgets the "shithole country" where he came from and they never go back and make it better.

After all of these events and thoughts, I came to a very satisfying decision - I decided that I want another career shift, I want to teach. I want to become a university professor and the field that I'm interested in might be a bit of a shock, but I want to study and teach Middle Eastern & Islamic studies. After I took that decision, I started looking up universities and I was very surprised to find that most of the professors and students are white people, so I'm like "why are you bringing white people to teach white people about brown people?". So I want to be this Egyptian, African, Brown, Muslim university professor that sheds a light on an underrated region and a misunderstood religion and get paid for it for once. Who knows, maybe one of my students would really understand what white privilege is and when the time comes, she'll hire an Egyptian guy in her workplace and give him the hope guys like me lost on the way.