Ibrahim and I met at the bookstore again for our fourth meeting to talk over coffee. Since the subject was on the forefront of his mind the last time we had met, I asked him about the tests he was taking in order to prove his proficiency in English. He told me he had recently taken one of them in Oklahoma over the weekend and felt that he had done much better on it than the last one. I was glad to hear that he was doing better on his tests since we had been meeting and working on his conversational English. He also told me that he was trying his hardest to do well on the tests so that his parents would pay for him to go to Chicago to visit his friends. One of his main motivations seems to be to travel and we talked about many of the amazing places he could visit.
The talk of travel led to a discussion about the differences in the way Americans spend their money compared to Saudi Arabians. Ibrahim commented on the fact that Americans spend much more of their money experiencing things, such as travel, whereas Saudi Arabians use much of their money on material items to display their wealth. I asked Ibrahim if there was any kind of class system in Saudi and he told me that there was really no middle class. The rich control most of the wealth and refuse to distribute any of it to the poor. Ibrahim seemed really irritated with the situation and kept telling me how he wished he could change the economy but nobody really knew how to fix it. Although he felt that Americans had a much better handle on this kind of situation between the rich and poor, I told him that many people could not figure out how to fix our economy in recession because of the gap between the upper and lower classes.
After we had been talking about the different classes for a while, I asked Ibrahim whether the differences in wealth caused any prejudices between the people in his country. He said that this really wasn’t a problem. I then asked him if he encountered prejudice here in America. His answer shocked me. Ibrahim said he encountered a lot of racism even though he thought that we would be a more tolerant country since we have so much more diversity than Saudi Arabia. He then began to relate an example of racism towards him that he had experienced. While at a store with his friends, Ibrahim had been talking to an employee and had been telling him about how he was studying English here in the U.S. The man, seemingly being polite and interested in Ibrahim, asked him what he planned on studying once he got into college here. Ibrahim then told him of his interest in studying to be a pilot because he thought it would be a great career path. The man responded by saying, “Oh, so you just want to learn to take off, right?” When Ibrahim asked what he meant, the man remarked again, “You just want to learn to take off. You don’t really care about learning how to land do you?” I was mortified when Ibrahim told me that this happened to him. Even though our country has been through some rough times, I can’t believe that someone could be so callous and generalize an entire group of people with a few extremists. Ibrahim was extremely hurt by the remarks of this man but he told me that he knew that some people would always be stuck in their ways and that it was up to us to keep it from affecting the way that we lived.
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