I am a 22 years old Egyptian Muslim woman. I am also a student at AUC, majoring in Economics. Being a woman definitely influences how I behave in the world and how I carry myself. I face many struggles with the different elements of my identity, because a lot of people assume things about me and I feel like I constantly have to prove myself to others. As an Aucian, people usually assume that I am spoiled and that I don’t have to work hard for my degree, while that is truly not the case.Travelling outside of Egypt, makes me connect more with the fact that I belong to the Arab/Middle Eastern culture; I feel that I only notice this when I am in a foreign country and I find that I connect more with an arab, in regards of language, religion and culture.However, being in Egypt makes me more mindful of the differences that are between the Egyptian culture and the cultures of the other Arab countries. In my opinion, it is a matter of perspective and the kind of situation that I am exposed to, as I find that I connect to different parts of my identity depending on the place, time and the people that I am surrounded with. Moreover, I feel like no one has one solid identity that they are able to portray to every single one they meet. So as I am proud of being an economics student at the AUC, when applying to jobs, meanwhile, when I meet someone from a different social class I might hide the fact that I study at AUC to avoid having my character being judged based on that fact solely.
I have learned a lot about different aspects of my identity and my biases through the class discussions and the articles that I have read. “ I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another… I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another ” (Bakhtin, 1981,p. 287) I believe that this is very accurate and to the point in explaining how we are personally affected by the existence of other/different people. Furthermore, I found the article “How ‘African’ is Northern Africa?” to be very enlightening regarding a fact that we sometimes forget to analyse or question; and that is are we considered Africans and do we view ourselves as that or do we assume we are different because we are from Northern Africa so we don’t belong to Africa as much as other countries there and also because of many other reasons such as religion and race.I began to question a lot of things after reading this article and I feel like I started to analyse more what people around me think regarding this topic. “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.”(Mourid Barghouti) I became more conscious of how sometimes I take things for granted and assume that I know the whole story of someone while no matter what I know, I still do not qualify to share his story or discuss it ,as I only know one perspective and one of the many sides of the story.
The first quiz I chose was the Gender-Career IAT, and the results I found were that my responses suggested a moderate automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.I expected this result while answering this quiz, as I thought that my answers were leaning towards this association more. I expected that my result would be affected by the fact that my mother did not work while i was young, however she started working later on and now she spends more time working than my father does; I thought that this would have a great influence in my answers but I guess not.
The second quiz was the Fat-Thin IAT and my results showed that I have a slight automatic preference for Thin people over Fat people.I thought this quiz would be interesting because I feel like in my circle of friends very few of them would be considered overweight and I never thought about it and about whether weight would be something that I care about or not.Meanwhile, while i was growing up , my father would always talk to me about the negative effect of being overweight as he tried to help me maintain a healthy weight unlike my older sister who was more on the overweight side. I think that I have built this image of having fat as bad due to how I was brought up in my home and not because of how my community or friends were.So overall, I kind of expected this result.
Some of the biases that I find in my daily life are biases against lower-income classes,as a lot of people tend to judged based on what someone is wearing, what car they own, which school they went to and they would reach a conclusion which is simply that this person is not good enough to be associated with them.Also, a lot of the people i meet with everyday are biased towards races other than theirs;especially now with the coronavirus, and how when someone sees an asian person around they would usually comment about them and in certain situations they would even abuse that person.
At a very young age, I used to be biased against people who are different, and that would include people of different gender, color, and religion. At this age, I couldn’t grasp the idea of being different and I always thought that my religion is the right one and i didnt understand why someone would make such a decision, of choosing a religion other than Islam. As bizarre as this sounds to me now but, these biases extremely affected my behaviour while I was young, as i tried to avoid boys and would hate to play with someone with a darker complexion than me. By time and knowledge, I grew past these biases and learned to accept differences more and I can’t deny that meeting more people of different races and religions and interacting with them has helped me understand that I can have more things in common with an atheist than with a person from my own religion.
References
http://dialogic.blogspot.com/2009/11/mikhail-bakhtin-dialogic-nature-of.html
