Abstract: The Treatment of the marginalized-self: Race and Social Injustice in The Poetry of ‘Antara b. Shaddād and al-Sulayk b. Sulka. Racial discourse in Arabic was in part transformed in pre-Islamic society. This paper will explore racial discourse on the basis of colour in pre-modern Arabic society, a society where tribal forms of loyalties and kinship influenced values and social norms. Black people, for example, were subject to marginalization; which was reflected in both poetry and prose. The paper will particularly discuss the concept of the “marginalized” and “the image of the other” as expressed in the poetry of the pre-Islamic poet ‘Antara b. Shaddād (d. 615 B.C.), who was the son of an Arab aristocrat and a Ethiopian black slave mother; who was proud of his colour and wanted to promote a different moral standard to judge a person based on his or her qualities or actions rather than race, or colour. There was also his contemporary, the poet al-Sulayk b. al-Sulka (d. 605 B.C.), who was also a member of the avant garde poets (al-ṣa‘ālīk) famous for their rebellious against poverty and social injustice. These poets fought against the racilization language of the time and attempted in their poetry, whether with praise, love, or positive description, to imply a contrasting discourse that counter inherited social norms and structure as well as the socially constructed negative image of the other or “the slave black.” The poetry of ‘Antara and al-Sulayk underlines and counters patterns of hierarchical representational discourse of the Arabs of the time, which was established as a Self-Other dichotomy. These two poets aimed to transform these boundaries, by removing these exclusions of colour or race. The paper will explore how “the marginalized self” of the black poet was able to creatively express its own identity and offer a creative perspective that alter the “center” or the established socially constructed poplar conventions. It will also show how the other was imagined in the works of these two poets.