“I can’t read,” he said. The children grew silent.

Mohammed’s dream, he said, is to follow in his father’s footsteps and drive a Kia minibus. He said he already knew how to drive, but that he needed to wait five years to be hired.

Image Washing cars is the only source of income for many African-Iraqi boys and men, they said, because no one will hire them. Credit... Joao Silva for The New York Times

“Until then, I’ll drive my bicycle,” he said. Everyone around him laughed.

Majid Hamid, a lanky 20-year-old who is among the lot’s oldest workers, said some days were better than others. It had been a bad day for him as well.

“From the morning until now, I haven’t washed a single car,” he said. It was past 6 p.m.

But even on the good days, he said, they still had to deal with customers who frequently used racially derogatory terms when addressing them. “They say, ‘Abu Samra,’ come on, go fast!’ ” he said. “What can I do? I can beat them up, but there will be trouble afterward.”

Lighter-skinned Iraqis consider Abu Samra a term of endearment, but the car washers said that for them it is a vicious slur.

They say they are called a lot of other names, and are often picked up by Army patrols and taken to bases where they are threatened with beatings and imprisonment if they continue to wash cars. They say the soldiers leave them alone when lighter-skinned people are working in the lot. Ahmed al-Sulati, deputy chairman of Basra’s provincial council, said neither racism nor color consciousness existed among Iraqis, and that the lives of African-Iraqis are no more difficult than anyone else’s. “There is no such thing in Iraq as black and white,” he said, echoing what most people here say publicly.

In a run-down neighborhood about a mile from the car wash, Mr. Hamid and thousands of other African-Iraqis live side by side with Arabs in mud-brick houses in various stages of collapse. His brother, Rafid, 19, also works at the car wash, but has a second job in a small satellite television repair shop where he works with his stepfather.

Their sister, Amani, 16, has been pulled out of school because the family can no longer afford the daily bus fare. “I miss school,” she said. “Sometimes I cry.”