Regarding the joyfulness of the Lebanese uprising

For many years I've written, along with many others, about the way racism makes the racialised hate themselves. It just dawned on me that perhaps one can use this more generally to argue that a pertinent way of differentiating between forms of rule and domination has to do precisely with whether, or to what degree and how, they make the dominated/ruled/governed hate themselves. 

I don't think that it is necessarily the case that any form of rule and domination has to involve the production of self-hatred. Also, this is not about democracy versus dictatorship. Some democracies can produce more self-loathing than some dictatorships (I think. but I am open to debate on this issue). Nonetheless it is the case that, for instance, both the Lebanese ‘democratic’ and Syrian ‘authoritarian’ forms of governmentality, have treated their people with such contempt, even if in different ways and with different means. Both have made their people feel powerless and demeaned such that they have ended up not only hating their rulers but also hating themselves in the process. 

This is not always easy to see for, paradoxically, hatred of the self can express itself in a form of narcissism that only a trained eye with an intimate knowledge of its subject is able to recognise it for what it is, and to particularly discern in its resentful ethos the unhealthy pathology of self-hatred and lack of belief in the potency of one’s agency that is behind it. 

It is this background of self-hatred that explains why the moment of uprising is often marked by another kind of narcissism, a joyful and healthy one. After years of self-loathing and internalising one's lack of worthiness, suddenly one re-discovers something about oneself and about one's people and one's community that is worthy of love. Rather than each person mirroring to the other what they think is worse about oneself, they begin mirroring what is best.  A ‘rush’ in one’s sense of efficacy vis vis the world happens. it is that rush that Spinoza called Joy. and this has been nothing but a Joyful uprising so far.

Between The Bearable and The Unbearable: The Lebanese Revolution to Come

What is happening in Lebanon is truly special. It is special in terms of local and regional politics and it is special as a more specific instance of the struggle against the rule of neo-liberal capitalism in the world.

Lebanon's capitalism has always been extreme and reactionary. When people talked about laissez-faire capitalism, Lebanon's capitalism was described as laissez-tout-faire so bereft it was of any governmental control on capital accumulation. This is still the case, and in the neo-liberal age, Lebanese capitalism remains extreme and reactionary in its complete obliviousness to anything that can be called a 'public good'. It is also completely oblivious to the social and environmental consequences of the pathology of obsessive wealth accumulation by the Lebanese ruling class. The whole political system of sectarian patronage is articulated to this pathological economy. If anything trickled down in this system it is that pathological obsession with accumulation. The Lebanese believe in it the way they believe in Saints and their miracle. Not every prayer to a Saint has to produce a miracle for there to be a belief in the Saint’s capacity to produce miracles. Indeed not even a majority of prayers to the Saint have to produce miracles for the belief in the Saint to be pervasive. In fact, let us face it, not even a minority. It is enough to believe that a Saint produced a miracle once or twice for people to end up believing in him or her for a long time to come. In much the same way, not everyone who is going to have a relation of patronage with a Lebanese political leader is going to accumulate wealth beyond belief. Not even the great majority of the leader’s followers, or, yet again, a minority. It’s enough to have the example of a couple of people who have made it thanks to this political leader for people to believe in him. It is this kind of ‘belief’ and adherence that has been broken in the current uprising.

While neo-liberalism openly calls for less government it has been clear for a long time now that it nonetheless does have a governmental logic, and even a governmental culture. This governmental logic and culture has been circulating within all the global, national and institutional spaces touched by neo-liberalism. In a nutshell, it involves an experiment in pushing marginalized people to the limits of what constitutes a viable life. This, to be clear, does not just mean pushing people towards poverty: many poor people can still live a viable life. Neo-liberalism combines a politics of impoverishment, with an attack on people's self-worth, their sense of well-being, their sense of sovereignty over themselves and their sense of dignity. 

Neo-liberal technology of (lack off)/government is inspired by the techniques of governing prisons. It involves well-oiled and financed policing capabilities, while what is devoted to a politics of care for the growth and well-being of people is kept to an absolute minimum. It is well-established that neo-liberalism involves an inflation of the repressive, policing part of the state (what Pierre Bourdieu called the right arm of the state) at the expense of the welfare-oriented/left hand of the state. But the government of prisons involves more than this: it is the art of keeping people at the absolute limit of viability. This is what brings out the issue of the bearable and the unbearable. For to reach the limit of viability is to live within the confines of a bearable life. A prison aims to keep the life of prisoners bearable: that is, viable-but-only- just so as to not push the majority of people into mass revolt or mass suicide. One can see this logic played out best in the government of open prisons such as the detention camps where asylum seekers are kept and perhaps most iconically in Gaza where the technique of producing a bearable life is at its most 'scientific'.  It gets to the point whereby the Zionist government (in complicity with the Egyptian military dictatorship) allow into Gaza the absolute minimum amount of nutrition possible. This is based on a calculation of how much nutrition is needed per person for the Gaza population to just survive. At the same time, this nutritional politics is accompanied with a systematic politics of policing and repression as well as a politics aimed at demeaning and degrading people. It is a similar politics that we find in the centers for the detention of asylum seekers in Australia, the United States and Europe.

While we might think of Gaza, prisons and detention centres as exceptional and unusual, in fact neo-liberalism, everywhere around the world, has involved pushing people to this space at the limit of human viability where it experiments with the borderline between the bearable and the unbearable life: how far can we impoverish, how far can we ignore the wishes and aspirations of the people we are governing and not take them into consideration, how far can we walk all over them, demean them and make them feel alienated from power and from each other.

It can be said that it is this slow incarceration within the confines of a just viable, bearable life that is continuously hovering over the limits of the unbearable that the sectarian form of Lebanese neo-liberal politics and economics has subjected the Lebanese people to for some time now. The culture of contempt towards the governed that this type of governmentality produces was amplified in Lebanon by a political class imbued with a neo-feudal sense of entitlement, where even the corrupt stealing of, and profiteering from, public investments is considered an entitlement. Add to this, the particular personality of certain members of the government which exude a repellant form of arrogance and lack of any sense of understanding or empathy towards the governed. Add to this a week dominated by mismanaged fires that destroyed substantial parts of Lebanon's shrinking forests. All of the above, formed the background against which people ended up experiencing a government proposal for a tax on WhatsApp calls as the straw that broke the camel's back. 

Many people think that calling the millions of people descending on the streets 'the WhatsApp revolution' is demeaning of the significance of the uprising. I disagree. The sphere of personal communication has been for a long time one of the last spaces where people experience a certain sense of viability and self-worth in the face of the politics of the un/bearable. One only needs to note the serious joy on the faces of relatively poor people connecting and chatting 'freely' on their mobile phones to see the extra importance the availability of this relatively cheap mode of communication has acquired in their lives.

The sense of release, pride in oneself and others, and just pure happiness that one finds among the Lebanese who are demonstrating and that is entangled with the feeling of anger and frustration cannot be explained by a narrative that only concentrates on the struggle against ‘economic deprivation’. The Lebanese struggle shares its preoccupation with questions such as ‘life’ and ‘dignity’ with many other global struggles against neo-liberalism, from the Spanish Indignados to the Gilets Jaunes. This is so precisely because neoliberalism is always experienced not just as a subjection to poverty but also as a crushing of the totality of one’s economic and symbolic worth. A politics of viability is not easily identified as a politics of the left. Indeed, it can already be noted that the Lebanese uprising shares with the Gilets Jaunes a combination of many contradictory political tendencies all opposed to ‘politicians’, desiring more participation, more respect, etc.

However, the Lebanese uprising also constitutes something unique and specific vis a vis both Lebanon’s political history, and vis a vis the history of the global struggle against neo-liberalism. Regarding its Lebanese specificity, the current uprising has a strong proletarian and non-sectarian component which lacked in previous popular uprisings in Lebanon. A grass roots spontaneous politics that does not define itself as Christian, Sunni or Shi’a, etc. and that frees itself from the dominant forms of sectarian affiliations is unique in the history of Lebanon. It is revolutionary in itself, that is, it is revolutionary for simply coming into existence. It is particularly so in the way it has taken the form of a politics of irreverence towards ‘sacred’ political figures, the previous ‘Saints’ referred to earlier. It remains analytically to be seen, but along with the forefronting of questions of justice and corruption, perhaps this tendency has been helped by the particularly prominent role that women have played in the uprisings.

The uprising's global specificity also resides in this freeing of oneself from sectarian identification. Not to collapse the movement into a variant of western politics but simply to explain it better for a non-Lebanese readership: this freeing of sectarian identification would be the equivalent of Trump supporters waking up to themselves and deciding that Trump is part of the neoliberal system that is crushing them rather than the road to salvation. Except that in the Lebanese situations the belief in Trump like figures’ saving and redeeming qualities has a long institutional history and is even more difficult to break with.

It is of course not clear what the future of the uprising will be. It is yet to face many tests. Not least the tyranny of geopolitical reason that has cursed every social movement in the Arab world whereby every politics has to be measured not only in terms of a local reality shaped by internal politics but also a geopolitical reality shaped by global and regional political manoeuvres. Geopolitics is a kind of ‘reality principle’ whose face in Lebanon is principally Hizbollah the political party born out of the heroic resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and that has slowly moved from being dependent on Iranian support to play its Lebanese politics to becoming a representative of Iranian geopolitical interests in the area. The Party’s recent history as far as its involvement in the Syrian uprising and its inability to even /mildly tamper the primacy of geopolitical reasoning is not promising, to say the least. We are yet to see in the Arab world a political authority that manages to be anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist in geopolitical terms, and that is also open, at the same time, to political movements with local democratic political aspirations.
Still, it is of course to be hoped that the Lebanese uprising will lead to the formation of an alternative political leadership that can help formulate and crystallise the million demands made by the demonstrators, while also managing to preserve their revolutionary spirit. But, regardless of the outcome, these Lebanese men and women who are occupying the streets of cities, towns and villages across Lebanon today are political heroes. As already noted, their politics is in itself a form of heroism. In engaging in this politics they leave a valuable inheritance that will be the basis, if not today, certainly in the future, for the emergence of an alternative kind of politics. For the production and passing on of such an inheritance future generations will be, as we are today, very grateful.

The Reactionary Anti-Reflexive Turn

I am looking at the photo of two police officers in Galveston, Texas. They have a black prisoner, hands tied behind his back. He’s on foot and they’re walking him on a leash. The photo and the way it invoked slavery caused an outrage. The police apologised said that the officers ‘didn’t have any malicious intent’. But how ‘un-reflexive’ - that is, how lacking in critical self-awareness - one must be to not realise today, in 2019, that to be a white person riding your horse wearing a cowboy hat and dragging behind you a black handcuffed person looks bad? 

I am also looking at a photo of a mob, in Lebanon, carrying placards that say ‘Employ only Lebanese People’ and ‘Syrians, go back where you come from’. I see Lebanon’s minister of foreign affairs, Gebran Bassil, encouraging these people. I cringe. Is this minister who is continuously dealing with Lebanese immigrants not aware of the history of ‘go back where you come from’? How can he not be aware that the Lebanese who have migrated to all corners of the globe have been subjected to that very same taunt everywhere they’ve been? But you know you are losing the battle when the president of the United States himself so lacks reflexivity as to use exactly this kind of language.

Recently, I watched The Final Quarter, a film about the booing of the indigenous footballer Adam Goodes in Australia.The film makes clear how racist the booing was. But there was no clear sense as to why the crowd kept on booing well after many were pointing to the racist nature of the booing. To me it became clear that the crowd was booing Goodes precisely because they were being told not to boo him. More than wanting or not wanting to be racist towards Adam Goodes, they didn’t want to be told to reflect on the nature of their racist booing. That is, the crowd were booing the politics of reflexivity itself.

I am thinking these events in terms of reflexivity because, at the moment, I am teaching my students about the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist who has most elevated reflexivity to a social scientific technique. Bourdieu-ian reflexivity demands that social scientists reflect systematically and rigorously on the way they collect and analyse data and the way their relation to what they are researching is part of the very constitution of the object being analysed. Bourdieu differentiates between structural reflexivity which involving analysing the social position from which one is gazing at the world and biographical reflexivity which is the analysis of one’s personal formative history. But the two are nonetheless related and to me, Bourdieu’s reflexivity was the ultimate stage in a university education marked by a continuous examination of oneself and one’s prejudices. Becoming aware of the way we are marked by our position within the relations of exploitation and domination that structure society was by far the most personal dimension of getting an education. It meant that education was never just about acquiring positive knowledge about the world, it involved working on oneself to become better. 

I come from a middle-class Lebanese Catholic culture that saw itself as uncritically pro-western in its outlook. It is a culture which bristled with all forms of classism (looking down at poor people and seeing them as responsible for the state they are in), sexism, racism (towards Muslims and Arabs whom we were encouraged to think of as 'not us' and as backward, but also towards blacks) and homophobia. As such, as I saw it and still see it, there was endless room for reflexivity and for bettering myself. Most importantly, I internalised the firm belief that reflecting on oneself and working on oneself to be less sexist, less racist, less homophobic, less transphobic was, firstly, a never ending job  –  I will always have traces of these structures in me and have to continuously work on myself in this way, and, secondly, it was a good thing  –  it was good for society and it was good for me personally to work on myself in this way. And it is this firm belief in the goodness of reflexivity and critical self-awareness that makes me look with alarm at those un-reflexive moments described earlier. It seems that they are an increasing trend that is part of the backbone of the turn towards reactionary politics today. As with the boo-ers of Adam Goodes, there is a revolt against an imaginary super-ego and a reactionary sense of liberation from ‘having to watch oneself and be careful lest we hurt someone.’

I am not alarmed because some people are unable to be reflexive. One of the advantages of a Bourdieu-ian education is that it invites you to be reflexive about reflexivity itself. Reflexivity needs some social conditions for its flourishing and indeed, the university has been one of the main places where these conditions exist. There is no point assuming that people who are reflexive are so simply as a matter of will, or worse still, because they are morally superior people. Being overworked and worried and tired and feeling besieged in daily life does make one less open to reflexivity. Even in the most mundane of ways. I myself can say that I am less willing to be receptive to a reflexive critique of my residual sexism vis a vis domestic labour if I am feeling tired and irritated after a long working day.

An inability to reflect on the social conditions that allow one to be more multicultural, non-sexist, etc. is a form of non-reflexivity that is specific to the liberal middle-class. Rather than seeing its ‘openness to change’ as the product of its ‘life of ease’ this middle class sees itself as morally superior. It uses its liberalism as a mode of asserting forms of class distinction and superiority over working class people. The latter are portrayed in the process as vulgar and unable to be reflexive. This, in fact, is not true. There is a long tradition of reflexivity and openness to change among the working classes. Except it is less ‘show offy’ than middle class ‘openness’ and not as good to use in the United Colours of Benneton-type ads of glossy magazines. As such this very down to earth, matter of fact and non-declarative working class reflexivity is kept out of the visual culture of global capitalism. It is made invisible. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of the history of reflexivity that this invisibility has made it evolve predominantly in the form of a de-facto alliance between reflexive intellectual culture, middle class forms of anti-sexism, anti-homophobia and anti-racism etc. and global capitalism. This alliance has been most detrimental to the spread of reflexive politics outside of urban liberal spaces and blunted its progressive political potential. 

To be clear though, the main problem today is not the people who are not reflexive enough but can be. It is those who defensively think that reflexivity is a bad thing and who are encouraged to do so by various media shock jocks and politicians. For such people being invited to reflect on one’s sexism or racism is not seen as an invitation to ameliorate oneself. Rather it is lazily experienced as a mode of being put down and victimised. Lazily, because it is a license to not do anything at all. While some of the classist modes in which this demand for reflexivity have been made have contributed to its rejection, there is no doubt that anti-reflexivity is also a reflection of the self-interest of a greedy section of the population who sees itself as deserving more and who has put its desire for economic social climbing before all else. This population has grown to see those who make demands of reflexivity as political enemies who have nothing truthful to say. Their demands to be sensitive when speaking about people’s weight, people’s physical appearances, etc.. are laughable examples of ‘political correctness’. Invented, but occasionally real, examples of a lazy political correctness gone wild were used to delegitimise what in essence is a good down to earth reflexive politics. One can laugh at the effort to use ‘s/he’ instead of ‘he’ and show an awareness of the gendered nature of politics. But is it anything more than an effort to be considerate and aware of the way gendered relations of power mark our lives and our writing and an effort to combat them? Even an invitation to reflect on better ways to relate to nature in the face of global warming is seen today by the anti-reflexive mob as an elitist pack of lies, and as yet another strategy by this elite to victimise ‘ordinary people’ and stop them from accumulating wealth. For, as seen from this anti-reflexive perspective, the reflexive elite is alarmist and interested in propagating guilt. In fact, there is nothing to be guilty about and everything is really ok: it is ok to use plastic, it is ok to mine for coal, it is ok to be sexist and, most of all, let’s not forget, “it’s ok to be white.” The last thing needed is someone telling us we need to critique ourselves.

We have had several years now of the legitimisation of this smug self-satisfied rejection of the reflexive imperative in the form of rejecting ‘political correctness’, or rejecting ‘navel-gazing’ as John Howard, in Australia, scornfully called it. It can be said that anti-reflexive culture as an ascendant force has seized power in several parts of the world. We are also seeing it aiming to enter the university in the guise of the need for programs that educate people in ‘Western Civilisation’. The idea that to celebrate certain Western texts is a defence of ‘Western Civilisation’ while the reflexive writing that critiques those texts for their racism and sexism is an attack on Western Civilisation is intellectually poor, for what is the reflexivity I am talking about other than a finer moment in Western civilisation (though one should be aware that there are other reflexive traditions)? The idea is in fact so obviously intellectually poor that one feels that it would be quickly recognised as such by many more people if it wasn’t so ‘financially rich’. But this is true of the whole anti-reflexive tradition. 

Response to decent people re: my Guardian 'where are you from' piece

I am more than used to the internet reactions of the white supremacists who always reduce a complex argument to something simplistic enough to allow them to produce their now ritualistic  'you've got be kidding' and 'how can you be so dumb' and all that. They never strike me as interested in discussing anything so I am not addressing myself to them that's for sure. But it seems that a number of decent genuinely concerned people actually took my recent article in the guardian to be of the order of 'if you're white you should never ask people where they come from'. 

Fortunately for the world, I don't believe I am powerful enough to tell people what to do and what not to do in life. 

It goes without saying that I accept as I pointed out in the piece that lots of people ask 'where are you form' for very simple and social reasons. and I am sure no one is about to stop because of this piece. 

I also accept the even more obvious fact, I feel ridiculous to have to say it, that lots of people, all over the world and in variety of circumstances, and not only people of non-White European ancestry ask others 'where are you from'? Indeed, let me say that I have asked lots of people where they are from. I mean... really... that's hardly what is interesting here.

What I am pointing to is what happens when you say something as mundane in the midst of existing racial relations of power and those relations of power inscribe themselves in what you are saying whether you like it or not. In such situations, as an academic I spend a lot of time thinking and researching how this process of inscription happens. 

But as someone also engaging in public discourse, I believe I can make people benefit from my research and thinking and make them reflect on some of the complexities that are inherent in what they are doing. So I guess from a behavioural point of view my article did have an invitation for white people to see the complexity inherent in the question that they ask. and so perhaps those who are convinced by what I am conveying will be more subtle and more sensitive when they ask their question, especially when they have the desire to follow it up with the even more inquisitive power-pregnant 'yes, but where are you really from?'.

so you can guess from the fact that I am asking people to be more subtle and more sensitive that I am not addressing myself to the white right internet mob who are anything but.

Also it is unfortunate that in order to shorten the piece we had to remove the middle part of this section which adds complexity and make those who are recipient of and oversensitive to the question 'where are you from' also reflect on why they are over-sensitive to it:

"My students from non-White European ancestry invariably hate being asked this question. This is so even though they recognise that more often than not the person asking it means them no harm, and is simply and genuinely, or thinks it’s polite to be, interested in where they are from. We’ve often reflected together about this and about what bothers us about the question ‘where are you from?’ I try to add some complexity by noting that I have met in my research some working class people from non-White European ancestry who have complained to me about the opposite. Their complaint takes the form of: ‘I have worked for x years in this place and no one has bothered asking me where I am from.’ And so I suggest that maybe the question bothers people like us, people with high educational capital, because we have high cosmopolitan aspirations. In a bar enjoying ourselves with similarly cosmopolitan others we want to be one of the cosmopolitan crowd and, in such environment, the question ‘where are you from?’, even when well-meant, often abruptly makes us feel singled out, alienated and provincialized. But we all agree that it would be different if the relation between the questioner and the questioned was not as structured by racial relations of power to the extent that it was: it is more often than not that the questioner is of White European ancestry and the questioned is of non- White European ancestry. And because of this the question necessarily, and regardless of the intent of the questioner, ends up carrying in it the power and entitlement of the questioner."

Get it into your head: the extreme right does not want to debate you.

The Lebanese village of Ehmej is a place dear to my memory. There a friend had, and maybe still has, an old-style house with rooms supported by stone arches, what they call '3a2d' (see photo), with a particularly acoustic friendly room where my friend had put the best of the best sound equipment and where we drank all kind of things and smoked all kind of things and listened to definitely not all kind of things. We listened to what we considered seriously good music, or at least music that we took very seriously: from Zappa and Mahavishnu to Bartok, Telemann and Wagner.

After I came to Australia, whenever I go back to Lebanon, going to Ehmej was like a ritual which involved a reunion with friends and a reunion with the space. In my case this was more significant than the usual diasporic return pilgrimage. It was so because I was changing significantly. I was transitioning from a right wing Christian Maronite Lebanese to a left wing Australian (I had not become part of a Lebanese left wing culture yet at that time - this happened later while I was writing my PhD). The space made up of my old friends (who were mainly Maronites), and Ehmej acquired a particular importance to me, not least because I could be myself and didn't have to hide my changing world views as I had to do in my parental home. I am simplifying what is a very complex situation, but in an important way, Ehmej was a bubble that allowed me to continue to exist in Maronite Lebanon where my roots and friendships were, amidst the deep divisions of the Lebanese civil war, and despite not belonging there politically anymore.

And yet one day the inevitable happened: here we were listening to some music and smoking some hash when some friends of friends joined us. at first it was much the same, endlessly talking about music, but soon the conversation moved from music to migration, and this guy started explaining why he needed to migrate by producing a classical Maronite war trope: the Palestinians want to take over Lebanon and make it their own country as a substitute to Palestine and they want to kick 'us' out of Lebanon.

'This is just nonsense' I couldn't help myself from saying.

He turned to me as if I had just denied the most fundamental truth that was at the basis of his existence, which probably was not far from the truth.

'Fuck off right, I don't know who you are but fuck off. we don't need to hear this bullshit here' he said.

'well. I am interested. what evidence you have that the Palestinians want Lebanon as a substitute to Palestine. Why would they still be teaching their kids that the most important thing on earth is returning to Palestine if what you say is true. have you got any evidence other than the fact that you believe this to be true?' I insisted.

'you want proof. I'll go to my car and get my gun. will that be proof enough?' the guy said in a seriously threatening tone.

I was scared. But I gathered enough courage to say 'forget it. I don't do gun things. I prefer to just talk'.

My friends were equally upset even if not in the same way that someone was bringing 'the war' and guns into that space. The guy clearly did not belong and was never invited again.

To me, it was a rude awakening: living in Australia as a student and taking intellectual 'revolutionary' politics seriously, spending nights debating and arguing about Marx and world politics, has lulled me into thinking that revolution was a long intellectual debate, involving shouting matches at the worst. In Ehmej, that evening, and for all my revolutionary Marxism, I realised there and then that I was just a silly Australian student. I was not, and more importantly, I was glad I was not, as I didn't want to be unless i absolutely have to, a warrior. For if I was going to be a warrior, it meant that comes a time I'd have to stop having 'interesting debates', and settle things by force.

This is something I think about often today as I witness the rise and rise of extreme right wing culture. I hear the right wingers speak, and spout their half baked 'truths' about the environment and about refugees, etc. and I know that these views are an insult to any kind of rigorous, empirically backed, intellectual thinking, and I have this initial intellectual urge to want to debate them, but then I smell in what they say the whiff of that guy I met in Ehmej long ago, and who wanted to go and get his gun. and suddenly I am facing the sad truth: Notwithstanding all these 'interesting' Q&A that are trying to convince us otherwise, these extreme right guys and girls don't want to have a 'rich conversation' with me or anybody else who disagree with them. They want to beat us, and even beat the shit out of us when they can get away with it (metaphorically and non-metaphorically).

The Kiss of the Chiclets Girl

I didn't sleep very well last night and ended up having this in-between dream and recollection thing. I think most of it is true recollection:

I am ten-years old or so. I am sitting in the front passenger seat of our car. my younger sisters are at the back. My mum is driving and my dad is not around. It's Christmas and we're driving through Beirut's Hamra Street looking at the street's reputed xmas decoration. It must have been 1967 or 1968. It's a cold rainy night and 'Nights in white satin' is playing on the car radio.
There's a lot of traffic and the car is almost stationary. I am looking at all the decoration and all the shoppers. Its sparkle sparkle everywhere made more sparkly by the wet road. It had just rained but its not raining now and I have the window open. my hand is resting on the car windowsill. night in white satin, sparkle sparkle. Suddenly the dark face of a girl my age was struggling to look through the window. She was selling chewing gum 'Chiclets', a common Beiruti mode of begging-as-if-one-is-not-begging. 'Allah y khalleelik yeh' (May god keep him safe for you) she said to my mother hoping we would give her some money. Mum ignores her but I was connecting to her face which I found beautiful. And then she said to Mum. 'Allah yehr-so' (may god protect him) and suddenly she kissed my hand.
I was a bit shocked and withdrew my hand. My mum saw her kiss my hand and she screamed at her: W'lee! -untranslatable I think, but an equivalent of 'You' (said with a tone to imply You little shit). Rooheh N'ebreh (Go and get buried). I on the other hand, didn't want her to go and get buried at all. I was still feeling the kiss. Too young to think 'sex' but definitely felt it as libidinal/sexual experience. I certainly didn't dwell on the structure of inequality and humiliation that constituted the kiss both as something pleasurable to me and as an intrusion in the eyes of my mother. Mum was fuming and I was dreaming of her face and the car moved: Night in White Satin, Merry Christmas, Sparkle Sparkle.

Regarding #FourCorners on International Students as Cash Cows - Free Advice to White People (take it whichever way you like):

Dear White People,

When you are talking, writing, or making a film, about non-white people, a non-racist take will *not* come to you naturally, no it won't; it is not your default position, no its not; no matter how nice or how well meaning you are (and I'll generously assume that you are).

A take on racialised people where racism has been minimalised as much as possible is something you need to labour on - a lot -,  this includes (but not only) listening carefully, interacting and integrating the voices of the racialised that you are talking about, and most importantly, thinking them as part of the people you are addressing as opposed to 'talking about them'. Even the most seasoned anti-racist writer, and i humbly include myself here, will easily lapse into racism without a continuous intense, reflexive and vigilant labour. you might think that's a lot to do and it is, but you need to think of it as the price you pay for all the privileges that you otherwise get from the racist structure in which you are positioned. there is no easy and comfortable path away from racism; easy and comfortable is the path you are already on because of racism.

When you haven't laboured on what you are doing in this way,  when you have not reflected and sweated and subjected what you are doing to a stringent critique, it will merely reflect your structural position within the power structures, That is, it will turn out to be racist (yes it will).