Racism

14 May 2009 1 Comment

by s.moua in Uncategorized

A part of my PCPP project included a training for selected individuals at the college who would later train the rest of their colleagues.  The  college director was suppose to select teachers/administrators to be trained. In order to prepare for the training, I created a needs assessment form for the participants. I assumed that the director would be fair and thoughtful in his selection. However, when I got the forms back I noticed that most if not all of the people were (White) Moors.  I was pretty disturbed by this so Mark and I went back to the college to figure it out. I didn’t want to accuse the director of being racist, but I was unwillingly to do a training where a group of people were furthered marginalized.

I’ve been told from the beginning that Mauritanians, especially Moors are racist; which is why they do not place Black volunteers in the North. In addition, I have also had several discussions with Black Africans about racism in Mauritanian. However, I haven’t paid too close of attention to it; but lately, I’ve been more aware of it.

Anyways, Teacher Appreciation Day allowed me to see how Black Africans and Moors interact with one another. Actually, let me rephrase that, it allowed me to see how Moors and Black Africans rarely interact with one another. Furthermore, one can see that White Moors privilege others in their own race over Black Africans.  This can also be seen in the selection of girls for the GMC. All of our girls are Moors except 2 of them. However, they were not selected by the directors because one was a participant last year and was asked to come back; the other was a participant in another GMC.

I don’t know exactly how to tackle this problem; all I know is that it bothers me and is not how I work.