On the second day of Ramadan, in early May of 2019, the Doha-based television channel Libya al-Ahrar aired an episode of its hidden camera program in which the show’s star prankster blackens her face, adopts mocking versions of a “Sudanese” accent and attire, and then traps strangers in an elevator with two monkeys that she insistently describes as her children. Only a few days later, the show repeated the blackface gag. This time, the actor asked the waiter in a Lebanese restaurant in Libya to read the menu line by line with her as she responded with outrageous incomprehension, confusing things like “juice box” and exclaiming, “You have dog juice?!” The elevator episode circulated on social media platforms with some condemnation but remains available on YouTube; the restaurant episode seemingly aired without hesitation. The ostensible comedy in these depictions relies on anti-black racism and, in so doing, functions to ratify discourses of white supremacy. Like blackface performance practices elsewhere, these depictions reveal much more about those creating and consuming the racist portrayals than about those supposedly being portrayed. In these Libyan hidden camera clips and elsewhere in North African popular culture, who are the “white” Arabic speakers that these racist depictions aim to elevate? What is whiteness in this context?

How should we think about these questions—about whiteness and race—in North Africa? The answer requires consideration of Islam, slavery, indigeneity, Arabness, the Sahara, and colonial legacies in the region. It also requires accepting two claims.  First, there is analytical purchase to thinking whiteness in and through North Africa, even while this formation of whiteness only partially overlaps with the more dominant formations of whiteness attendant to and produced by European colonialism. Second, through a range of discourses and performances in both scholarship and popular culture, blackness is repeatedly constructed as if it were non-indigenous to North Africa. Ironically, this latter discursive practice is among many which, as Jemima Pierre has argued, “actually work to impede race analysis about the African continent (beyond southern Africa), entrapping us into a kind of race-blindness.” The North versus Sub-Saharan Africa divide, Pierre continues, “has shaped Africanist scholarship to the point that this distinction is often assumed rather than interrogated.” This naturalized division is racialized: colonial scholars painted light-skinned people of the southern Mediterranean as “closer” to Europe both geographically and in terms of civilization. By continuing to describe North Africa as inevitably distinct from “Black Africa,” we not only reinscribe this violent hierarchy, but we also prevent ourselves from seeing racialization as processual and dynamic. In so doing, we miss the opportunity to understand North and Saharan African spaces as sites for the ongoing production of race and white supremacy.

To offer a starting place: in a 1967 article, historian Leon Carl Brown described North Africa as “the great border zone where white ends meeting the area where black begins”—where, he contended, “native whites and native blacks have confronted each other since the beginning of history.” Brown’s essay goes on to incorporate a number of the key factors that I identify here, and compellingly illuminates a period of early postcolonial African hope and its emerging challenges by describing the ambivalent Pan-Africanism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and others in the 1950s and 1960s. But this formulation of a “great border zone” aptly illustrates the racialization of naturalized geography which has long characterized colonial (and some earlier) descriptions of northern Africa. When we take for granted the idea that the Sahara constitutes a natural border, we reify a logic that posits racial whiteness as indigenous to North Africa, racial Arabness as contributing to the maintenance of that whiteness, and racial blackness as non-indigenous. Amazigh (“Berber”) indigeneity is here simultaneously configured as racially white and erased insofar as indigenous modes of thinking difference are domesticated.

Here, and in my research on contemporary Libya, I am invested in understanding whiteness not as a static ontology but as “a problematic, or an analytical perspective: that is, a way of formulating questions about social relations.” Thinking in terms of both conceptual and embodied movement, I am especially interested in “the ways that whiteness seduces and rewards, becoming the subject of fantasy and desire,” and I agree with Steve Garner that “the best way to understand whiteness is to think both relationally and comparatively.” In Garner’s work and in more recent scholarship, this has primarily meant taking the critical study of whiteness beyond its “home” of the United States and into Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. But what happens when we take this study from settler colonial contexts into the postcolony? To turn again to Pierre, “how could any postcolonial society not be structured by its legacy of race and racialization—especially when colonialism was, in the most ideological, political, and practical way, racialized rule? How do we, in fact, analyze the persistence of white (and racialized Arab) privilege in postcolonial spaces?”

Whiteness is both productive and the product of affective force, and while it moves, it moves us. As Sara Ahmed has argued, “Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and un-finished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space.” My argument here is not that (some) North Africans are in any stable sense white or have access to the top rungs of global hierarchies of white supremacy. Rather, I am interested in the array of things that formations of whiteness do and enable in the contexts of northern Africa.

Whiteness shapes both how bodies can take up space and what spaces are available to whom. As Ahmed writes,

If the world is made white, then the body-at-home is one that can inhabit whiteness. As Fanon’s work shows, after all, bodies are shaped by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white’, a world that is inherited, or which is already given before the point of an individual’s arrival. This is the familiar world, the world of whiteness, as a world we know implicitly. Colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach.

Ahmed is not describing North Africa here (even while a trace of North Africa haunts this passage with Fanon). But the “bodies-at-home” in North Africa are most often those that can inhabit whiteness. As I suggest above, both Western scholarship and local discursive practices make North African spaces white. In this way, whiteness in North Africa takes on valences of “Europeanness” as a colonial remnant, while it also operates in another register, as “our own” whiteness, a color-coded language of virtue and status. This includes but is not reducible to white-as-Western because a local articulation of whiteness can be valorized at the same time that Westernness is rejected. This local articulation of whiteness is bound up in histories that stretch back at least as far as the seventh-century Arab invasion of North Africa.