DIVERSITY
As someone born to an Arab Saudi father and an African Sudanese mother from the Darfur region, my life has always been heavily influenced by major issues of diversity. Arabs do not respect Africans; they denigrate them and treat them like second-class citizens. Frankly, I do not have any early memories that do not include encounters with racism, classicism and the tremendous social differences associated with relative poverty and wealth. My father, who was a wealthy man, divorced my mother when I was three, forcing her to leave home to train as midwife to support her four young children. During that time, I was cared for by various different relatives until the age of seven but it was a difficult experience for me because their attention was less than what I had received from my mother. It taught me that I needed to learn how to fend...
I remember running as though for my very life and hiding in a cattle shed for more than 24 hours. Unfortunately, I was eventually located and forced to undergo the unspeakable trauma that I can never forget. Afterwards, I was never able to trust my mother entirely and I became somewhat rebellious. I became determined to become educated as a means of overcoming the oppression of my life in Sudan and worked hard enough in school to achieve the highest score in the country on the university entrance exam. Eventually, I received a BA in Law and B.sc. In Economics.
In Sudan, I was beaten and…
