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Saudi Arabian oil giant sparks outrage after using a South Asian man as ‘human hand sanitizer’

The recent developments related to the COVID-19 global pandemic have caused not only panic and fear among people but also brought out the racist in us and the inequality of healthcare privileges among social classes that shows how big the gap between the poor and rich is. 

A Saudi Arabian company has come under fire after pictures of its migrant worker dressed up as a human hand sanitizer dispenser sparked outrage among people online, calling the blatantly racist stunt “dehumanizing and disgraceful.” 

Saudi Aramco, a state-owned oil giant, drew flak for having a man who appears to be of South Asian origin wear a  surgical mask and huge mobile hand sanitizer amid the coronavirus outbreak. According to a report, the worker seems to be walking around inside and outside one of the company’s buildings and distributing sanitizer to staff members.  

People quickly called out the company for the racist act and pointed out the pre-existing and widespread racism in many Middle Eastern companies, and how the inappropriate stunt speaks volumes about the public’s perception towards migrant workers in the Gulf region. 

Others even described the move as a “shocking contempt for human dignity” and an “egregious violation of human rights,” while some said that it only shows that “slavery was never abolished, [it’s] just repackaged.”

In a statement released via Twitter, Aramco expressed its “strong dissatisfaction with this abusive behavior that was used to emphasize the importance of sanitization, without the approval of the company’s concerned party”.

“The company immediately stopped this act and took strict measures to prevent it from happening again,” the tweet in Arabic reads. However, people online are urging the company to apologize not to the public but to the involved migrant worker.

In a time where anyone — regardless of social class, gender, race, religion or political standpoint — can be affected by or exposed to the virus outbreak, it’s disheartening to see how discrimination still prevails and how most of us seem to have contracted different kinds of societal diseases that not even advanced medicine can cure.

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