Internal Debates
Are Moroccan racists [“Les marocains sont-ils racistes?]” (TelQuel, 2003)? Under this provocative title, the Moroccan monthly magazine TelQuel published its special issue on anti-Black racism in February 2003. Considered then part of a flourishing independent press, the magazine echoed sub-Saharan students and merchants in Rabat and their experience with everyday racism twenty years ago. A decade later, in 2012, TelQuel shifted its provocative title into a statement: Moroccans are racists [“Les marocains sont racistes”] (TelQuel, 2012). To understand this shift, we need to appreciate the changing face of immigration in Morocco as the country became a land of settlement, not only transit, for migrants from the sub-Saharan region. In 2002 the Moroccan government passed a law to prevent immigrants from crossing to Europe following European pressure and funds. Morocco’s hinterland and shores became heavily militarized, and wandering sub-Saharan bodies became more visible, not only in the bordering northern cities (Hannoum, 2020).
In October 2005, the international press reported on a police raid in the northern city of Nador that left one hundred sub-Saharan migrants stranded in the desert where the security forces had dumped them. The tensions around immigration reached a tipping point when a newspaper and a magazine respectively depicted sub-Saharan migrants as “al-Jarad al-Aswad [the Black Locusts]” and “le Peril Noir [the Black Threat]” (AlJazeera, 2005; “Le Peril Noir,” 2015). The headlines spawned an uproar on social media, pushing the state to seize the magazine Al-Shamal and summon its director to the prosecutor’s office for hate speech. The public outcry about “le Peril Noir” compelled Maroc Hebdo’s chief editor, Mohamed Selhami, to issue a public apology on the Moroccan TV network 2M.
Everyday racism has also been documented by the National Council of Human Rights, the Moroccan Association of Human Rights, and groups for the defense of immigrants’ rights, some headed by sub-Saharan immigrants (Alami, 2014; Conseil national des droits de l’homme, 2013). For instance, the Group antiraciste accompaniement et de défense des étrangers et des migrants (GADEM, or Anti- Racist Support and Defense Group for Foreigners and Migrants), engaged in political advocacy while holding the Moroccan government accountable for violations of immigrants’ human rights.[1]
Mobilization and Solidarity
Several local initiatives illustrate the growing awareness of anti-Black racism against both sub-Saharan immigrants and Black Moroccans. The vibrancy of these debates stands in sharp contrast with the myth of discovery assumed by Western-based scholars about Moroccan racism. Thus, in 2014 the antidiscrimination group Papers for All col- laborated with GADEM to launch a first-of-its-kind two-month campaign called Ma smitish ‘azzi (My name is not ‘azzi ) (feminine ‘azziyya), which is a racist slur for Black people (Al Ashraf, n.d.). The campaign began on March 21 on Facebook, as the Moroccan government was launching the first phase of the regularization of twenty-five thousand undocu- mented sub-Saharan immigrants and refugees. Though this move was unique in the North African region, it was not entirely surprising. Domestic and international organizations’ reports about Morocco’s mistreatment of sub- Saharan immigrants had hurt the country’s diplomacy about western Sahara and threatened the state’s neoliberal ambitions in Africa, including a bid to return to the African Union (Katya, 2014). Stephane Julinet, a founding member of GADEM, depicted the campaign Ma smitish ‘azzi as a horizontal action to support this top-down regularization policy.[2]
Ma smitish ‘azzi was the founding moment for the rise of Black Moroccans’ identity politics. On January 27, 2021, the BBC Arabic channel aired a video clip of another trending campaign, Mashi ‘azziyya, launched on Instagram and TikTok by fashion model Houda Fou- nou (BBC Arabic, n.d.). Her goal was “to break the stereotypes relating to Blackness, in North Africa and the Middle East, and deconstruct white beauty standards.” Founou opened her page to both Moroccan and sub-Saharan migrant men and women who lined up to claim Blackness and denounce prejudice. Houda Founou declared, “Black is Beautiful” and “‘Aziyya is racism.”
Her campaign went viral, but despite her bold stand against racism, Founou rejected the argument that racism was institutional or that Blacks experienced discrimination in state institutions or on the job mar- ket. Founou acknowledged that other Black Moroccans rejected her campaign and denied the existence of rac- ism. Another campaign, the “blackmoroccans” Insta- gram account created by Fatima-Zahra Quatabou, ech- oed these conversations, focusing on racism targeting Black Moroccans.[3]
The Myth of Discovery
Oblivious of the vibrant debates about race in the Moroccan public sphere over the past twenty years, a discourse has emerged recently from Western institu- tions and scholars to expose racism in North Africa, with Morocco as a showcase. Morocco’s perceived stability after the Arab uprisings and Western-friendly policies transformed the country into a laboratory for producing expertise on race. This discourse revitalizes the old colo- nial myth of discovery, as some scholars and media pun- dits claim to be uncovering the faces of racism in North Africa that have gone unnoticed by North Africans. Claiming to fill the presumed vacuum in local debates, they publish articles with titles like “‘There Is No Race Here’: On Blackness, Slavery, and Disavowal in North Africa and North African Studies,” “Ending Denial,” and “Between Slavery and Racism in North Africa” (Gross-Wyrtzen, 2023; King, 2015; King, 2021).
Black Moroccans have become the popular subjects of simple and unsubstantiated claims about their “otherness” and about the centrality of slavery to their per- sonal histories (Boum, 2021). This perspective is best represented by Stephen King, who published in the Arab Reform Bulletin, the Journal of North African Studies, Africa is a Country, and POMEPS, among other outlets. King’s position is exemplified by declarative statements such as “Morocco is a diverse country and a post-slave society, yet diversity, the history of slavery in Morocco, and the racism and discrimination that is generally inherent in post-slave societies are not taught in schools, adequately addressed in law, nor discussed within most non-Black Moroccan families” (King, 2015). While any effort to end the state’s “denial” of slavery and its impact on the per- ception of Blackness in Morocco is salutary, we need to be aware of the way outsiders are positioning them- selves as saviors. Slavery does not in any way exhaust Morocco’s historical ties with Africa, notably West Africa (Ait Belmadani and Chattou, 2014). These ties were knotted in webs of exchanges between scholars, Sufi masters, students, spouses, trade partners, and more. They were strengthened later by dreams about liberation, Third-Worldism, and Pan-Africanism that gained purchase in all parts of Africa, inspired in the 1950s and 1960s by the various independence movements, the Algerian revolution, and Nasserism (Aidi, 2022). Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik illustrated the multi- faceted ways in which Pan-Africanism foregrounded postindependence state policy in the 1960s and 1970s. North African governments turned south, encouraging cultural, artistic, and political exchanges. Thus, deco- lonial continental thinking circulated by and through Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian cultural platforms during and after the 1960s (Tolan-Szkilnik, 2023). There is much more to the ties between Morocco and the rest of the continent than the history of slavery would contain.
Dismissing these ties, some of these writings recycle unsustainable presumptions of a clear demarcating line between two distinct categories—Blacks and whites—a color line that separates oppressors and oppressed, privileged and underprivileged. While many Western authors and pundits rush to save Black Moroccan from their oppressors, they ignore the long history of mixing and the enmeshment of Moroccan identities in variations of skin shades, ethnicities, and languages, never mind mentioning the geopolitical conditions and immigration policies enforced by Europe upon Morocco that have trigered the lively internal debates and racial sentiments (Boum, 2021; El Guabli, 2021; Ait Belmadani, 2023).
Most of these writings privilege slavery as a unique explanatory paradigm for understanding racism in Morocco today. These debates gained currency in the United States with the publication of Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam, a book that documents the creation of the Black Army of ‘Abid al-Bukhari in the seventeenth century under the reign of Sultan Moulay Ismail, one of the founders of the current ruling Alawi Dynasty (El Hamel, 2013). While a rigorous review of this work is outside of the scope of this reflection, I want to examine some of its reverberations in the United States and beyond (Aidi, 2023). A central assumption of the book is that today’s racism relates directly to the history of “Arab slavery,” whose foundations are rooted in Islam and legitimated by sharia and Arab thinkers like Ibn Khaldun (Aidi, 2023). Black Morocco is taken as a testimony of an insider, authorizing a traveling discourse about the centrality of Arabo- Islamic slavery,[4] and sharia as a legitimating discourse aiming to limit but not abolish it. These arguments became a reference point for proliferating debates in the United States about Moroccan racism, echoed by a few Moroccan scholars back home and in Europe (El-Miri, 2018; Gross-Wyrtzen, 2023; Yassni, 2023).
Black Morocco was critical for bringing slavery into public debate and consciousness. It showed slavery as foundational to the history of one of Morocco’s few Arab dynasties. What it does not mention is that most dynasties were Amazigh, and Blackness was the primary racial and ethnic composition of all these dynasties that originated from the deep south, producing generations of Black sultans, emperors, state officials, religious scholars, and notables (Mamdani, 2018). Stories about slavery have been pervasive in modern Moroccan novels since the 1960s.[5] However, these debates have taken a new form when read through US paradigms and scholarship.
Multiple Contexts for a New Zone of Theory
French research institutions based in North Africa, including the Centre Jacques Berque in Morocco and l’Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain in Tunisia, have also been involved in the dissemination of race knowledge through academic conferences, film festivals, and research programs.[6] They are forging a new “zone of theory” for generating knowledge about race, but one that, ironically, is unauthorized in France (Abu-Lughod, 1989). The discourse of race is now tested in the Maghreb as a laboratory for renewing old realms of expertise about authoritarianism, sexism, sectarianism, fundamentalism, and now racism.
In sharp contrast with this focus on racism in the Maghreb and the discourse emerging from the Anglo-American academy, European academic institutions, notably in France, are still reluctant to endorse race as a paradigm. Any attempt on the part of racialized schol- ars to address racism in France is dismissed, as El Miri argued, as “a racist endeavor” (El Miri, 2018, p. 107). He shows that racialized researchers are accused of “bringing race back into the scientific realm” as a way of pursuing political goals. Working outside proper academic settings, groups like les Indigènes de la république (the Indigenous of the republic)—a name that constructs today’s France as a colonial state—use decolonial epistemologies and praxis to denounce the French state’s racist discourses and policies. This network of writers, academics, and activists puts geopolitics in conversation with history, while helpfully contrasting US-centric intersectional analysis with other forms of intersections, including colonialism, capitalism, and Islamophobia (Guénif-Souilimas, 2000; Bouteldja, 2017).
Intersectional analysis made its entry into femi- nist circles in France in the past decade as a method for bringing together questions of class, gender, and sexu- ality. Yet as Fatmea Ait Belmadani and Nassima Mou- joud argued, intersectionality has yet to include the experience of the racialized Other of white feminism (Ait belmadani & Moujoud, 2012, p. 13). These questions and others have been on the agenda of les Indigènes de la république, but this group is totally marginalized in mainstream conversations about rac- ism in France. The discourse about racism that is sup- pressed in France is now displaced to North Africa.
There is a decolonial logic that cuts across these local initiatives and critiques. Anthropologist Abdel- lah Hammoudi situated decolonial logic in relation to “double critique” as a method for relating to the post- colonial situation and colonial knowledge.36 In the case of the discourse on racism, a double critique entails fighting racial prejudice by attending to local initiatives and upholding people’s agency while remaining deeply suspicious about the transfer of part of the discourse of violations of human rights to the southern part of the Mediterranean. As Black Moroccan artist Mbarek el-Bouhchichi noted, the transfer of policing south of the Mediterranean is an attempt to “keep its northern shores white.”[7] El-Bouhchichi’s art is devoted to illus- trating what he calls “ethnic pluralism in Morocco.” He does not see Blackness as a limitation but as “a source of inspiration” and African pluralism as identity (Alaoui Soulimani, 2020).
In the United States, the stakes of race are enormous for the scholarship on the Middle East. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of the police in May 2020 was attributed to a phone call made by an Arab American store owner, and the event risked polarizing Arab Americans and African American communities. As protests rocked cities across the globe, including in the Middle East, a sustained effort by scholars of the Middle East to engage with issues of racism spawned debates on- and offline. Black Iranian, Turkish, and North African men and women importantly vocalized their experiences of racism by focusing on their specific national contexts. Some problems emerged, however, when their voices and racial analyses were appropriated by experts, both outside and inside, whose claims have different goals and effects.
When Blackness is represented as “the Other” of North Africa, a particular type of racialization is at work. Blackness is minoritized and whiteness becomes the dominant defining feature. There is a context for these discourses that present Black people as a statis- tical minority in Morocco, given the long histories of mixing and sharp colonial policies of minoritizations and racialization of the entire Moroccan population (El Guabli, 2021; Salime 2023). How does the assumption of whiteness as a dominant feature of Morocco reverse the Orientalist depictions of North Africans as (Moorish) Black to produce them now as white oppressors of their Black “outsiders” within?
Decolonial Ethics
Decolonial epistemologies call for our engagement with the colonial to debunk the myth of discovery and to question the power, positionality, and authority of those who write. To decolonize the debate about race and racism in North Africa, we need to be both critical about the violence of racism and attentive to the contexts in which knowledge about it is produced and circulated. Without being apologists for anti-Black racism, we need to reckon with the diversity of experiences and the specificities of histories of mixing in North Africa. We have to consider the current social and political situation of the migrants from the south seeking Europe who are becoming a new moment in this history of mixing. Above all we have to begin by acknowledging local initiatives and debates and learning from them.
It is important to speak to and from North African experiences, debates, and knowledge production, resisting self-authorizing tropes of discovery and rescue from the outside. Can we be cautious about transposing onto North Africa racial binaries and histories of racial segregation in the wake of Atlantic slavery, assuming that whiteness defines North Africa’s racial fabric and deny- ing the region’s roots in Africa? Offering slavery as the singular explanation for racial tensions in the present dismisses the political and historical specificities and geopolitics that gave rise to the internal debates about race and the violence of racism, debates that spoke to specific conditions in the country and region.
We need to exercise caution when interpreting the complex racial situation in Morocco, so as not to impose traveling theories or conceptual paradigms derived from different histories of racialization, especially different from the United States or Europe. Not only might they distort North African histories and social realities, they could also be politically consequential because of the geopolitical stakes, whether playing into hegemonic forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism or producing dangerous consequences for migrants in precarious situations whose bare life circumstances (and the reasons for them) could get swept aside when lumped together in discussions about anti-Black racism of other sorts.
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