A Personal Reflection on Identity In the Work Place
Being an Anglo-Jordanian
I am a 26 year old mellenial but I am bucking the trend- so rampant amongst my contemporaries-of being so attached to my ethnic identity. My Anglo-Jordainian background actually seems to be much less important to me than it did a few short years ago. It was not too long ago that you would be met with looks of dumb astonishment when your London accent was within earshot of ordinary Jordanians, in the streets, shopping malls and historical sites of the country. Even a family function, which you might think would have the advantage of familiarity made you feel like you were one of those concept vehicles-a striking one off, but far too peculiar to be road worthy, or in social terms, ‘one of us’.
As someone who has been travelling to Jordan as an Anglo-Arab for many years, before holidays to Jordan were in vogue, when Rainbow Street was a snap shot of the 1960s, with senior business owners stubbornly holding onto their otiose establishments, transformed into community hangouts for elderly Ammanis with a fondness for coffee and gossip and when seeing a foreigner was a relatively rare sight, I glimpsed something of what it must feel like to be a celebrity, having strangers gawp at you in amazement. The look of wonder and excitement was even more common in the more remote parts of Jordan, as you’d expect; when I used to visit Jerash and other sites with family members, we would invariably have an excited procession of locals trying to engage us with beaming smiles and broken English, spoken with the enthusiasm of a budding film star or diplomat. Our Western appearance belied our Jordanian roots. Sometimes I enjoyed my 5 minutes of fame, which was always cut short when my Mother responded to their calls in Arabic, exposing their misapprehension which melted their excitement into a solemn ‘ya sitti’ and lowered gazes. These were innocent times, times before the Internet or smart phones made western culture deriguer amongst the youth, when a sight as incongruous as a blonde Jordanian walking around assuredly with her cockney son would stop ordinary Jordanians going about their day in their tracks. So striking was our presence that unlike traffic lights, we would actually cause Ammani drivers to stop.
As I begin to take my first steps towards establishing my writing career it seems odd that a new current in the workplace is emerging which ignores our common humanity in lieu of a form of identitarianism that takes our ethnicity or race to be the most significant trait about ourselves. Whilst the personal story I have just shared about my experiences in Jordan are certainly part of what makes me who I am, I am much less keen on making any claims to victimhood on the spurious basis that my mother happened to be born in Jordan, a former British colony. However it is difficult to escape my Jordaniain identity because so many well-intentioned programmes and initiatives now exist in the work place which creates a working environment in which everyone is taught to be sensitive to someone’s ethnicity and how their ethnicity may disadvantage them. The notion that someone may be at a disadvantage on account of their race and may need to have more lenient performance assessments or interviews is very patronising and a form of racial bias. I can talk about my Jordanian background by giving light-hearted, trivial details like I did in this article and I am just as capable of discussing historical injustices perpetrated against Jordanians and Arabs as a whole. I am less confident however that my personal or career failures or successes or awkward encounters can be explained by systemic racial prejudice. To use a word like ‘privileged’ today is usually used in a wholly negative sense, implying someone, usually a white person who enjoy certain advantages that others are not able to access (or find it much more difficult to access) due to racial prejudice. Yet I do feel privileged for growing up in a country where I was barely made conscious of my ethnicity and I believe that this post-racial world which I felt I grew up in has receded further and further away I have grown into adulthood. In the workplace I am constantly reminded of my immutable characteristics and whilst I accept that there are very good intentions behind highlighting the plight of certain groups, I feel that lowering standards to accommodate ethnic minorities is one way of entrenching injustice rather than solving it. Encouraging a whole generation of young people to identify as victims in spite of modern day realities of racial equality is dishonest and will do much damage to the estimation of personal responsibility in our society.
