My name is Magnhia and I am 35 years old. I work in the social sector in a highly multicultural city of France and it’s my choice to do so. I also work with teenagers: they are young, they are racialized and immigrants, and they live in a stigmatized neighborhood. I feel attached to this community, even if I didn’t grow up on the block.
I grew up in a small town, in a primary school where I was one of three Arab kids. It was only in high school where I entered a more diverse setting, and I actually felt white because of this, and the other students would say things like I speak like a French woman. I asked myself: how was it that I had desired to familiarize myself with my community when it was something I couldn’t even recognize?
As a child of North African origin in France we come to realize that we are different. You hear people around you talk about the risks involved, that there could be people that won’t like you just because of that. I also think that being an Arab woman, we suffer from a bit of fantasy, exotism, meanwhile Arab men don’t experience this as much and suffer a harsher racism. For example, one time I had a coworker who would call me “my little date of the desert” and I would feel unnecessarily exocitized.
I always have this mentality of constantly being in challenge mode due to the fact I belong to a group that is underestimated by the population, this obligation to be a “good example.”
I consider whether my children will experience racism. For me the condition of being racialized is exactly that, one has to ask more questions that you wouldn’t consider otherwise.
You model your spirit through this experience and it creates a very specific behavior.
Sometimes it’s extremely hard for me to argue with people who don’t know this behavior, who just absolutely don’t understand and it’s like I’m starting from zero.
Is it that we have to educate people? I ask myself: why am I putting in the effort if they themselves won’t?
Regarding hate speech, it seems like it always bothers the same people. What I mean by this is that if there’s an Islamophobic tweet, it bothers just Muslims. And then the same people will say it’s not a big deal, they really don’t care. That for me is the most worrying, that it doesn’t bother them. It doesn’t shock anyone and you see that it’s a shared idea this way.
A good example is the discourse around the terrorist attacks in France. We asked Muslims to condemn the attacks, to apologize collectively. It’s interesting because we don’t see the vice versa of this situation. We don’t ask the French to apologize individually for colonialism. And then there are those who will always bring up the positive side of colonialism when the topic comes up too. We wouldn’t say that there are positives to terrorist attacks, of course.
From my childhood I have learned to pass between two different worlds: the world of my family and my culture and that of the dominant culture. This gives you a capacity to adapt easily wherever you go, an advantage I have based on my bicultural background.