Black Lives Matter protests spark debate over racism in the Arab world
BEIRUT — After she was fired without warning from her job as a housekeeper, the Ethiopian woman said, she was dumped at the side of the highway by her Lebanese employer.
He had intended to leave her outside the Ethiopian Consulate, where dozens of other Ethiopian domestic workers have been abandoned by their employers during the recent weeks of economic crisis here, but he stopped short, afraid of being spotted by news crews outside. The woman, named Tigist, said her employer had not given back her passport and phone or paid the year’s salary she was due.
Abuse of domestic workers has long been a problem in the Arab world under the “kafala” system, which excludes foreigners from labor laws and makes their residency — and fate — subject to their employer’s whims.
But the global uproar over racism, prompted by the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, has contributed to heightened dismay over the treatment of these often darker-skinned migrant workers from Africa and Asia and sparked wider debate among Arabs about racism in their own societies.
“This crisis coinciding with Black Lives Matter forced society to face the systemic racism inherent in the kafala system and in the way we treat migrant workers,” said Aya Majzoub, a Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch. “People started to understand that the abuse against migrant domestic workers was not caused by ‘a few bad employers,’ but rather by a system that enables and even encourages society to treat these women as second-class humans.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/black-lives-matter-protests-spark-debate-over-racism-in-the-arab-world/2020/07/07/83234c5e-b7ab-11ea-9a1d-d3db1cbe07ce_story.html
