Brief Overview Of What It Means To Be Me/Na

Brief overview of what it means to be Me/Na

I feel bad for clogging up people’s dashboards with this type of discourse every couple of days (even if I know it’s not my doing) instead of posting content, which is what people followed me for (honestly kinda discouraging when this is most of what I see when I log on here). Plus I’m honestly getting tired of addressing this over and over again. So here you go, one last post to put this all to rest, hopefully you’ll learn something new from this. I won’t be responding to any anons like this after this post. 

Here’s a couple of things anons have said about me where I just chose to block them and then move on with my day:

(got this masterpiece a while ago over a ship of all things, Arabic is a language not an ethnicity sweetheart)

(not really much to say here, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they didn’t know my nationality. Still disgusting)

I even got one that I refuse to share on here out of respect for myself and other POC (involved a racial slur pertaining to another race, honestly hats off to you for being creatively the worst human being imaginable). One moment I’m called racial slurs, the next I’m not even acknowledged for my ethnicity. So which is it? Tell me anons, am I a goat fucker or a white cracker, hm? 

Actually I’ll answer that one for you, since you seem to be lacking some cogs up in your noggin.

I doubt many people have heard of the term Mena. Hell, I myself was introduced to it not too long ago, and I’m Mena. That tells you a lot already about the erasure of my culture in western societies.

Mena simply stands for Middle eastern and North African, which most people generalize as “Arabs” which isn’t entirely accurate considering the fact that Iran is a middle eastern country but not an Arab state.

As you can see, there are a lot of countries that fall under the umbrella term Mena. The amazing geographical advantage this area held led to colonization. Colonization dates centuries back in time, speaking for my homeland Egypt, we’ve been subject to colonization dating back to Ancient Egypt. First came the Greeks, then the Romans, then with the introduction of Islamic rule came an era of medieval dynasties originally from Saudi Arabia ending with the rise of the Mamluk sultanate which was composed of several tribes and groups of nomadic Turks. Then came the ottoman empire which reigned for over 5 centuries, with some interference from the French around the 1790′s which lasted about two decades, until modern-era Egypt which was under British imperialism. It’s important to note that pre-modern era, the main ethnic group in north Africa were called the Berbers (there are other names used to refer to them), who had pale skin despite their black ancestors, yet still had distinctly different features compared to western and north European Caucasians. 

This is all speaking about one fucking country, and I didn’t even go into detail to save time. Do you people not realize the ethnic diversity in the middle east and north Africa? 

Generally speaking we’ve had European influences (British and French colonization), Euro-Hispanic influences (Portugal and Spain colonization), a large number of countries have typically Persian features (mostly in the Persian gulf and Iran). I haven’t even scratched the surface here.

With all this ethnic diversity you can now clearly see the need for an umbrella term to house the variety of ethnic groups and sub-groups here. Mena is no way, shape or form a good indicative of the ethnic background of each specific area but it’s a fucking start. 

When people from North Africa, the middle east or southwest Asia migrate, they have to legally write down that they’re white or some other race because there’s no option for us. I mean shit, I got called white twice on here, even though the third thing on my about me page is literally my nationality. It’s erasure.

I can’t even begin to describe how empty I feel regarding all of this; getting degraded because of my race when it’s convenient and getting my whole ethnic identity disregarded when it’s convenient. 

I know as someone with a pale skin tone, I have it way easier than other Mena who have darker skin colors, I wont sit here and try to pretend that colorism doesn’t exist. Because it does, and it’s disgusting. But at least have the common decency to address me correctly, I can’t count the amount of times I’ve mentioned my ethnicity/nationality and waited with baited breath for some sort of insult. 

Before you make baseless assumptions about me, please at the very least take two seconds out of your day to check the link in my description. It’s there for a reason.