Intolerance Towards Veil : Roots in Racism and French Colonialism.
CHAPTER: 3
INTOLERANCE TOWARDS VEIL : ROOTS IN RACISM AND FRENCH COLONIALISM.
INTRODUCTION
“It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil”1—Frantz Fanon.
" Our attitudes are not racist; they are based in fact. These people are animals, they are not Christians, your blacks are Christian. The Arabs don 't live in real houses but in huts, in holes in the ground; they 're uncivilized, uneducated, unclean. Listen to their music, watch how they dance; they have a natural (or was it unnatural) rhythm all their own. Your blacks were once slaves, these Arabs have no excuse. This is just how they are; this is the way Koran teaches them to be" 2- Joan Wallach Scott, first encounter with racism in France in 1967, in conversation with French colleagues at the bureau of civil registry.
On all accounts of French colonialism and occupation of North Africa, Muslims and Arabs are depicted as inferior people, incapable of assimilating to French national values. Depictions of inferiority range from religious practices, presumed sexual orientations to traditional forms of dress such as the veil or the headscarf. Intolerance towards Muslim stems from deep-seated psychological preoccupation with the “the other” and racial intolerance dating back to French conquest of Algeria in 1830. This section aims to address the historical context through which the present debate surrounding headscarves have arisen.
RACISM
Since the word "race" has largely disappeared from the French vocabulary, the Arabs are not necessarily referred to as different race, however, their place and position as "indigenes" measures up to the same status on their fundamental difference and inferiority. In the French context, such discrimination, as a social problem, is frequently subsumed in issues of social inequality and immigration, or conflated with xenophobia. In other
INTOLERANCE TOWARDS VEIL : ROOTS IN RACISM AND FRENCH COLONIALISM.
INTRODUCTION
“It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil”1—Frantz Fanon.
" Our attitudes are not racist; they are based in fact. These people are animals, they are not Christians, your blacks are Christian. The Arabs don 't live in real houses but in huts, in holes in the ground; they 're uncivilized, uneducated, unclean. Listen to their music, watch how they dance; they have a natural (or was it unnatural) rhythm all their own. Your blacks were once slaves, these Arabs have no excuse. This is just how they are; this is the way Koran teaches them to be" 2- Joan Wallach Scott, first encounter with racism in France in 1967, in conversation with French colleagues at the bureau of civil registry.
On all accounts of French colonialism and occupation of North Africa, Muslims and Arabs are depicted as inferior people, incapable of assimilating to French national values. Depictions of inferiority range from religious practices, presumed sexual orientations to traditional forms of dress such as the veil or the headscarf. Intolerance towards Muslim stems from deep-seated psychological preoccupation with the “the other” and racial intolerance dating back to French conquest of Algeria in 1830. This section aims to address the historical context through which the present debate surrounding headscarves have arisen.
RACISM
Since the word "race" has largely disappeared from the French vocabulary, the Arabs are not necessarily referred to as different race, however, their place and position as "indigenes" measures up to the same status on their fundamental difference and inferiority. In the French context, such discrimination, as a social problem, is frequently subsumed in issues of social inequality and immigration, or conflated with xenophobia. In other
Citations: in Francoise Gaspard and Claude Servan-Schreiber, La fin des immigres, Paris: Seuil, 1984, p.70 53. Joan Wallach Scott, op.cit, p.71