The crime of George Floyd’s murder restored the US’s position as an important theme by Arab writers. However, the issue of racism, at heart of the crime against Floyd, was only nominally the subject of these articles. The question of racism, for us, is the pretext for elaborating a position that is primarily based on foreign policy.
Those who despise the US because of its Middle Eastern policies are re-discovering that it is racist, and that its inherent racism can be traced back to the way indigenous peoples were dealt with. From there, passing through the Vietnam War, enough evidence is gathered to say that this country is a factory that produces nothing but ugliness, conspiracy and aggression.
Those who adore the US because of its Middle Eastern policies will discover, once again, that the affair is a conspiracy against the US, which, especially during Donald Trump’s era, spreads only justice, goodness and beauty. As for Floyd’s killing, “every world has its flaw.”
The “anti-American” faction sees the US to be conspiring against the world, us and, of course, George Floyd. Those who speak for this faction present themselves as the exclusive inheritors of his memory. Even Khamenei, Rouhani and Bashar Assad are disgusted with such a heinous crime, one that could happen only in the US! And there is, on the other hand, the "pro-American" faction, which sees it as a victim of conspiracies orchestrated by the world's bad guys, including bad American guys.
It is the nightmare of foreign policy, which is ingrained in our minds, preventing us from seeing the United States for the good and bad in it, which of its experiences are democratic and which are racist. Thus, the actual country is absent from our vision and our reasoning, as they are governed by outsider conclusions, which are based on voyeurism but feign extensive knowledge.
This obsession with foreign affairs, whether one is "with" or "against", forms the basis for our reading of phenomena and developments. We underwent such a thing with the former Soviet Union: those who admired it (basically the same people who hate America today) rebuked any claims that it had been tyrannical and oppressive, painting dissidents and revolutions demanding freedom in Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia as treacherous... and those who despised it (basically the same people who adore America today) refused to see anything in communism but schemes, intrigues and conspiracies ...
This approach changes nothing in America, Russia or any other country, but it has a bad and direct impact on us and our ability to learn and grasp things.
Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Brotherhood theoretician who went to the United States on a scholarship and lived there for two years, was one of the pioneers of this outsider and also racist outlook. He wrote in the Cairo magazine Al-Risala on December 3, 1951:
“The American is primitive in his artistic tastes, whether in his judgment of art or his own artistic works. Jazz music is his music of choice. It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires, and their desire for noise on the one hand, and the abundance of animal noises on the other. The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crudes creaming. And the louder the noise of the voices and instruments, until it rings in the ears to an unbearable degree, the greater the appreciation of the listeners. The voices of appreciation are raised, and palms are raised in continuous clapping that could deafen ears.”
This is an excerpt whose title was “The America That I Have Seen”. However, Qutb, who lived in America, did not live there. He looked at it but could not see. Crippled by his enmity, he was not equipped to notice anything or to grasp the complexity of the “enemy”.
Our failure to develop political thought and ideological awareness continues to grow as we continue to pursue and imitate Qutb's approach. For the “other” remains an object that swings between being either pure (if he is with us and we are with him) or a conspirator (if he is against us and we are against him). Thus, we remain incapable of understanding how different levels work (the law, the sub-cultures of society, the media, the weight of history and the impact of the economic situation in all its fluctuations,) as we do not understand, for example, how the crime committed against Floyd could take place in a country that, just 12 years ago, elected an African American to the presidency and then re-elected for another term.
Secondly, this approach does not contribute to limiting our racism, in which our political parties and intellectual currents are either immersed in or do not give sufficient attention to.
Third, it reinforces our lack of a universal dimension that respects the experiences of others in themselves, without appending them to our causes, especially as our tribal dimension is employed as an alternative tool for understanding: us and them, for and against... Thus, we remain, as far as political consciousness is concerned, stuck at our point of departure.
The US is, at the same time, great and dangerous, good and evil, and splendidly developed and astonishingly backward. It is always too vast and important to be summarized in a word dictated by its foreign policy decisions and our stances on these positions. After all, being fanatical about a cause or country may be understandable, but writers are neither soldiers on the front nor foreign ministers. It is they who produce meaning, and with a system of perception like this one, nothing meaningful can be produced.
