Confessions Of A Privileged Daughter

So, after 20 hours of travel, I finally arrived on the day of Sham An-Naseem, the Egyptian spring festival that looks a lot like the commercialized American version of Easter (with colored eggs and all but without the Jesus stuff).

On the plane, I read two books, one of which was Tim Wise's "White Like Me - Confessions of a Privileged Son." It is a book by a white man who discusses the advantages bestowed upon him in America simply by virtue of being white. Before you poo poo about the book, that's not what this post is about. Well, kinda.

As distinguished from most African Americans who don't have a specific country of origin to which they can point and occasionally visit relatives, I am a person of color who does. And, here in Egypt, in contrast with America, I am a privileged daughter -- not because of skin color, but because of my family's class status. This is not meant to brag, It actually upsets me.

I did not stand in the insanely long and chaotic line at the airport to clear customs -- my family knows a guy super high up who took care of everything in 5 minutes. Wham bam thank you mam! I didn't even have to fetch my luggage - there is a poor guy who earns the equivalent of a $1 (if that) who is excited about the prospect of making some cash. When I treated him with common human decency, he seemed genuinely surprised and complimented my uncles on my good upbringing. We should be complimenting him on his good upbringing.

From the airport, we went to gramma's house. At the basement level of most buildings in Cairo lives a poor family that earns a living by doing shit for richies upstairs. And, they earn that living until the day they die. Fatima, who lives downstairs from gramma, is probably my mom's age and has been carrying my bags up the stairs since I was a kid. She has kids who are more or less my age, have little education, and will do the same if and when I have kids and they come for a visit. It's not that Fatima and her offspring are stupid -- perhaps they are. More likely, however, they had the misfortune of being born into a bad lot. Which makes me wonder how the soul/family lottery got me into the family that doesn't buy chickens live to fatten them up to one day eat for dinner. Seems quite arbitrary to me. Sure my family is smart, blah, blah, blah, but starting with smart parents with basic means and the skin color or status society values doesn't hurt a damn bit either.

Here in Egypt I feel like a white person in America would feel if he or she had a conscience. It is hard to take pleasure in overindulgence when people around you are literally starving. And here, the rich overindulge. My cousin, a spoiled 19-year-old who will be the first in the family not to go to college, sits at home listening to hip-hop, demanding the latest MP3 player, which I unwhittingly brought for him upon request from my uncle. If my cousin was poor, he wouldn't have a computer, he couldn't refuse to put effort into anything because laziness among the poor means death by starvation and my uncle wouldn't be forking out lots of dough in hopes that a tech school where computer skills are taught will do the trick.

I then went to visit some friends who, at midnight, threw together a meal that would take me a couple weeks to prepare. And proceeded to deride me until I tried everything at the table (I still don't like baba ghanoog). I was sent home with enough sweets to keep me sugarfied for at least a couple weeks.

It is a little past 5am. Jet lag, several neighborhood cats in heat and the 4:35am call to prayer from the half a dozen mosques that surround gramma's all conspired to ensure that I would, at best, get a short nap. At least the weather is nice. The remainder of the day will be spent listening to family members decide which elitist club to take me to to impress me. They will then try to guilt me into eating like a gluttonous Louis XIV while the people at the bottom of the building scrounge dinner.