The Race Mind at the Races

Image taken by - Jassim Al Rumaihi

For this week I decided to go out for one of the flat races here at the Equestrian and Races Club in Doha. The aim was to look at the whole celebration from a sociological point of view, and how can race and ethnicity be interpreted. I got there and started to observe with all the vocabs we learnt in class in mind.

As I was looking around, I took one of the races booklets that had all the details of the races that were going to take part. I opened the first page and it had a list of names of all the people involved that helped in organizing the event. Some of those were long, with four or five names in one single line. Other was shorter having only the first and second name. In Qatar, not all Qataris are categorized as one ethnic group. Within the Qataris themselves there are many groups that share some ethnic origins in terms of having a shared ancestry. For example, Al Rumaihi’s would be one group, and each individual within that tribe would affiliate to the other as a person with an ethnic bond.

Then there are larger groups that have been tagged by the society. For example you would have Eaal Elgebael which translates to "sons of tribes" and they are groups of people that share Arab roots whether it stems from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or other parts of the Arab world. Another known tag name are the Hollah, and they are Arabs that have immigrated to Persia for a while and returned after that to the Arabian nations in the Gulf. There are also other categorizations such as Hathar and Baddo or Bedouins.

What is interesting though is what I found in the second page of the booklet. When I turned to it it was a list of horses, each with its own number and each with its own record. The top of the page was titled in bold letter “Pure Arabians”, and that made me think. Do horses really care about their origins as humans do? Of course not. Their brains may be considered as less developed than humans by scientists. Yet, their eyes are blind enough to see no color line.