In 2024, when war broke out in Khartoum, I fled to another city. I had just graduated from medical school and started working in a hospital—finally stepping into the role I had worked for my entire life. One day, a neighbor looked at me and asked a question that was not new, but still sharp enough to cut:

“How are you a doctor while being this dark?”

That question did not begin in 2024.
It has followed me for as long as I can remember.

From primary school, I was always at the top of my class. But my performance was never accepted at face value. Instead, it triggered suspicion. People would ask where I was from. When they heard “Darfur,” there was always hesitation—like something didn’t add up. Then came the attempts to reconcile it:

“Maybe she’s Arab… just with darker skin.”

That explanation was more acceptable to them than a simpler truth: That a dark-skinned girl from Darfur could be intelligent. Because in the unspoken hierarchy I grew up in, those two things were not supposed to coexist.

I didn’t just hear doubts about my intelligence. I heard instructions about my body. Iwas told to “clean” my skin—meaning to bleach it. I was told, directly and indirectly, that my Blackness was something to fix. As a teenager, those messages settled deeper. I questioned whether I would ever be loved. Whether a man would want to marry me. Whether my future children being Black would be seen as something shameful. These are not abstract insecurities. They are the psychological consequences of growing up in a system that teaches you—repeatedly—that who you are is a disadvantage.

What I experienced was not random. It was not isolated.

Anti-Blackness in Sudan is structured.

It is built on a hierarchy where proximity to lightness—socially, culturally, and physically—is rewarded.
It is reinforced by:

Beauty standards that center lighter skin

Social aspirations tied to being perceived as “Arab”

A national imagination where Khartoum represents acceptance, modernity, and legitimacy

For many Sudanese from rural or marginalized regions, the goal is not just success—it is acceptance into Khartoum’s definition of worth. And that definition has never been neutral. This system shapes outcomes. It influences who is seen as competent, educated, and employable. It is not a coincidence that:

White-collar spaces are dominated by lighter-skinned individuals

Darker-skinned communities are overrepresented in labor-intensive, lower-status work

This is not about individual effort. It is about access, perception, and structural bias. And it is deeply tied to the long-standing marginalization of regions like Darfur. These divisions do not stay social—they become political. They feed identity crises, reinforce exclusion, and contribute to national fractures that Sudan is still living through today

Years later, after leaving Sudan and moving to Uganda, I began to see myself differently. Distance gave me clarity. I realized that there was never anything wrong with being Black. Or being a woman. Or being intelligent. The problem was the system that tried to convince me those identities could not coexist.

There is a dangerous tendency to describe anti-Blackness in African contexts as “ignorance.” It is not. Marginalizing Black people in Africa is not ignorance—it is structured violence. It is learned, normalized, and reproduced across generations.

I was often treated like an exception. But I was never the exception.

I was the evidence.

Evidence that intelligence has nothing to do with skin color.
Evidence that the hierarchy is constructed—not natural.
Evidence that what is normalized can—and should—be challenged.

Dr. Rogya Abdelrasol