A few years back at Georgetown - more years than I care to count, in fact - I took a philosophy class called “Class, Race, and Gender.” I remember very little about the readings or the assignments (has it been that long since I graduated college?!), but I find myself thinking about that course a lot here because more so than anywhere else I’ve lived, eeeeeeverything in Dubai is structured along those lines. Since I’m hoping that everyone reading this blog will come visit me at some point, I will expound upon the most interesting of these socio-cultural cleavages (ooh, college language!) such that you may all be up-to-speed when you get here and the focus of my “Welcome to Dubai” car-ride-from-the-airport speech can shift to topics such as “Which is Better: Sweet Melon Shisha or Cherry-Mint Shisa? You’ll Be the Judge!” and “OMG let me tell you about the time they were going to build a building in the shape of a man wearing a dishdash and then the plans got canned because they decided it was un-Islamic to construct a building in the shape of a human form.” But I digress.
Anyhow, the following are some observations I have meditated upon extensively during my daily hour of driving time (when I’m not belting Hilary Duff/Jessica Simpson or cursing Indian drivers… which narrows it down to a daily 15 minutes or so, depending on how many times I get cut off by maniacal Tata buses careening through roundabouts on their way back to the labor camps).
Class: There are a thousand subtle ways class manifests itself here, but one of the most interesting (and least subtle) is on license plates. The hard and fast rule is that the fewer digits you have in your license plate number, the more of a captain you are. Mere mortals (about 85% of the cars you see on the road) have 5-digit plates; anything less than the standard 5 digits is where things start to get interesting. A 4-digit plate can be bought for a couple thousand dollars extra, which basically means you’re nouveau riche or you have something to prove. 3-digit plates are a bit more compelling, as they start at around USD $25,000; 2 digits sell for USD $100,000 and up, so usually having a 2-digit plate means you’re the “best of the rest” – not the inner circle, but the upper echelons for sure. 1-digit plates are aaaaaaaalmost always reserved for direct members of the royal family (keep in mind every plate has a letter as well, so there’s still 200+ permutations of the 1-dig plate), although occasionally you hear stories of non-sheikhs/sheikhas managing to get their hands on a 1-digiter for the bargain price of a million bucks. Okay seriously, all together now: “Where do I live?!” It’s actually quite interesting, though, the way Emiratis have taken all the guesswork out of social class (because honestly, everyone has a Range Rover these days). There are allegedly some tangential benefits to having a low-digit plate (people get out of your way in traffic, cops don’t pull you over because they know you own them, you don’t have to worry about valet because you can just leave your car anywhere you like) but these aren’t actually institutionalized and from what I understand, the biggest part of the appeal is just the “look at me” factor. And in case anyone is wondering… yes, my car will have a humble 5-digit plate. I am, after all, a woman of the people.*
Race: What I’ve realized is that there’s really no politically correct way to talk about race/ethnicity in Dubai. That’s not to say that race relations here are bad – I still maintain that when you have people from this many cultures, countries, and backgrounds living in the same place, there’s a net benefit in terms of eyes opened and cultures understood, even if the different groups only interact when forced. But even as someone who grew up in freaking Tennessee with a congressman who told me that black people needed to “stop being fed by the mother bird and fly out of the nest” when I went to DC to meet him (that’s a story for another blog), it never ceases to amaze me the extent to which race (ethnic origin is probably the better term) buckets what you do, where you live, how much money you make, where you go out, and who it’s seen as “appropriate” for you to socialize with in Dubai. E and I have spent endless car trips out to IKEA discussing the elaborate pantheon of stereotypes and trading crazy tidbits of information we stumble upon (a Jordanian colleague who’s lived in the UAE for two decades, for instance, spent the better part of an afternoon at work enlightening me about the different types of cars associated with different socio-ethnic groups: “Now the Toyota Prado, that’s the rich Indian car, whereas the Nissan Sunny is the poor Indian car…”). So much for chacun à son goût.
Gender: Being an American woman in Dubai is a funny thing. The vast majority of what I do, how I dress, and the way I act is the same as in the US – not in a culturally insensitive way (I don’t think), but simply because most of the time, most people are totally cool with it. So much so, in fact, that when I do hit up against a strikingly different reaction, it’s even more of a shock. The other night, for instance, I wore jeans and a tank top to go clothes-shopping at Massimo Dutti (it wasn’t like it was Ahmed’s Abaya Store or something – I would have been a little more conservative had I thought it would be an offensive context). While browsing through the sale rack, I saw an Emirati women next to me point to the half-inch of exposed skin between the top of my jeans and the bottom of my tank top, grab her friend, and exclaim “Shoufi, shoufi! Haram!” (“Look, look! Forbidden!”) I’ve also been told on numerous occasions that as a Western female, I need to buy an SUV because if I drive a smaller car, male drivers won’t respect me on the roads… although is that really so different from the US?! It’s especially interesting to compare my experience vis-à-vis that of my friend M, who was born in the States to Egyptian parents - even though she’s not Muslim, has a US passport, and has spent a total of maybe 6 months of her life in Egypt, the standards for her as an Arab woman are totally different from the standards for me as a “white” woman. When a bunch of us new transplants were discussing housing options, I got no negative reaction when I told people I was living with E (who happens to be male and not my husband). When M considered moving in as our third roommate, however, all her Arab friends told her she shouldn’t – even though she’s American, she’s first and foremost Arab (according to them), and thus she’s judged by different standards for what is or isn’t appropriate. Which kind of makes me feel like they think I’m just… beyond hope? But at the end of the day, I will still go to battle for Dubai by saying it’s probably the only place in the world where I can go to the mall in a t-shirt and shorts and someone else can go to the mall in an abaya and niqab and neither of us is going to get looked at like we have three heads (except by the “shoufi shoufi haram!” women, but as I said, they were the exception, not the rule).
And that’s all she wrote. Time to dash home for an evening of frantic party-planning before Housewarming Weekend (The Party to End All Parties) kicks off at our flat tomorrow night!
*Barring the future patronage of Emirati sheikh and/or Russian oligarch, in which case I would be pleased to take 3 digits or less, none of that 4-digit crap for me.
