My friend in Bahrain was having trouble with one of her shop assistants who had recently been absconding from work. When I called her a few weeks ago she was at the end of her tether and told me that she was thinking of replacing her. “Tracy is just so incompetent, sullen and irresponsible,” she moaned. “I mean she can’t do anything right. She doesn’t have a clue as to how to serve the customers and the accounts are a mess because she doesn’t even know how to add up!”
Yesterday I received a follow-up call with a horrified voice on the other end of the line beginning with the tantalizing, “You’ll never guess what?”
“Did you fire her?” I asked expectantly.
“No. I didn’t have the heart to. But get a load of this. She just calls up one day and tells me that she’s leaving because she’s found a new profession!”
“Of what?” I inquired thinking of all the jobs that she could potentially have embarked upon such as being a car park attendant, window cleaner etc.
“Teaching,” came the flat reply.
“Teaching?” I asked shocked. “But you told me that she was an incompetent manic depressive. How on earth can such a person be trusted with children?”
“I am so angry Lubna! She has been hired to teach at the same place where I enrolled my kids and it’s supposed to be one of the most exclusive schools in Manama. I pay a fortune in fees so that they can be taught by professionals and this complete idiot has just landed a job there.”
“But if she’s so stupid why did they hire her?” I questioned incredulously.
“Why? Because she’s white. When I asked how it is that a person who has no teaching qualifications or experience has been put in charge of my child’s education I was told politely that that’s what parents want. They feel more comfortable having a “native speaker” whatever that means,” she sighed. “I mean she doesn’t even have O’Levels! The fact that the woman in question has trouble writing her own name and has an IQ less than her most challenged student is no problem as long as she is white. That’s all it is. It’s the white face of teaching. What’s worse is that when I asked the woman who gave Tracy the job if she would expect to go to a doctor who hadn’t been to medical college or received any form of instruction as to how to treat sick people, she told me that that was different. She had the gall to say, ‘You don’t really have to be a teacher to teach!’ Can you believe that? The principal of a school saying that?”
I must confess that I have faced such pathetic discrimination within my own teaching career. Many years ago when I had freshly graduated from university in London and realized belatedly that in the Kingdom women could only work as doctors or teachers, I applied to the American School and was hired immediately even though I was, in their estimation, “overqualified”. Working in such a professional environment made its mark and I decided to persevere in this vocation, blissfully unaware of the fact that my initial employer did not prepare me for the injustices and bigotry I would eventually have to face.
Reality struck when I was asked to tutor a little girl of six whose parents, having heard my voice on the radio and insisted that I teach her, almost fainted when they saw my non-Caucasian-self walking through their door. I will never forget the suspended look of horror that pervaded their faces and how they turned to each other, jaws dropped, as if to ask telepathically who was responsible for messing up their daughter’s educational prospects by subjecting her to lessons with a brown woman. I had to reassure them with the comment, “Don’t worry. The only thing that will rub off on her is my accent not my color.”
It is exactly this shallow nonsensical attitude and blatant racial prejudice that allows a band of unqualified individuals, with the proviso that they have the right skin pigmentation in lieu of any other prerequisite, to teach in many of the so-called international schools that have mushroomed up all over the Kingdom. Other than a handful of academic institutions that are run under the auspices of responsible foreign missions, the other all-pervasive Mickey Mouse outfits employ a variety of former shopkeepers, secretaries and dinner ladies to impart knowledge to thousands of unsuspecting young minds.
Worse still, such practices are encouraged, perpetuated, abetted and condoned by the parents themselves. As absurd as it may appear, if there are two sections of the same class and one has an unqualified white “teacher” and the other an Asian, with a CV that boasts far superior credentials, parents will clamor to have their child admitted into the class with the white teacher. I have even known of mothers and fathers threatening to withdraw their child from the school if this criterion was not met. Perhaps the singularly most astonishing fact is that it is the Arab and Asian parents who are the most biased of all. Westerners are far more interested in the quality of education that their children are receiving regardless of whether the educator happens to be black, white or yellow.
It’s hardly surprising that our obsession with such superficial considerations is a contributory factor to our remaining so far behind in terms of advancement and progress.
No matter how hard we try we can never impersonate the color of someone’s skin, so perhaps we would be better off trying to imitate more attainable and desirable qualities like learning and erudition instead.