"Million-hoodie march" in Union Square, New York City, March 21, 2012. Photo by cisc1970.
In my neighbourhood and other venues across the nation, people are holding hoodie marches in solidarity with Trayvon, the young man killed by a neighbourhood watchman. Sure, it's a great thing to see so many young people -- black, white, male, female -- turn out in solidarity with a victim of injustice.
And now we're being remonstrated for only caring about this case of a black man wrongly suspected and then killed, and urged to add to our list of concerns the symbolism of the hijab, for the sake of Shaima Al Awadi, a woman in a hijab killed in her own home after a series of nasty threatening notes. Some people are holding hijab wear-ins out of solidarity with Shaima.
A blogger named Hesham A. Hassaballa on the interesting religious website I mentioned on my Russian blog regarding other recent cases of religious intolerance wrote this post: Respect the Hoodie, But Don't Forget the Headscarf:
We are Trayvon Martin. But we are also Shaima Al Awadi, and in light of two horrific murders, we should don the hoodie and the headscarf in respect.
Actually, no. I won't be doing that, Hesham. And it's not out of disrespect to these victims. It's for several other reasons, chiefly this one: we don't have to use identity politics, we don't have to use peer-pressured or even coerced empathy, in order to have all human rights for all. We have to have justice, by the light of universal human rights -- and identity politics doesn't help us with that.
This is a different approach than one counselled by the politically-correct crowd and all the "movements" that make endless identity parsings and endless (but awfully selective) demands for "solidarity". I'm all for solidarity. Solidarity is what saved Andrei Sannikov, as I blogged the other day. Solidarity is what you must use in the face of grave injustices.
But solidarity doesn't have to take the form of emphasis of identities; in the case of Sannikov, solidarity was moral support, urging of the government to abide by its universal human rights, and urging of the European Union and Russian, the chief actors in the drama of Belarus, to put pressure on the government until it releases political prisoners.
There's another reason: neither of these cases have yet come to trial, and there is a notion of "innocent until proven guilty" even for obviously problematic people. We don't know all the facts in the case of Shaima as the New York Times reports and the police are not yet calling it a hate crime, although it sure looks like one. Arun Gupta's report indicates that one theory of the case is an "honour killing," but this gets discounted in the rush to cover the overall issue of anti-Muslim hate crimes by Gupta, who is the co-editor of Occupy Wall Street Journal, and a person with a mission -- and a distinct bias. We know a lot more about George Zimmerman, but we haven't heard the arguments of the defense at trial yet.
Meredith Tax, a feminist writer and women's rights activist, has written an interesting blog about a feminist named Adele Wilde-Blavatsky who urged us not to equate the hoodie with the hijab. The hoodie is donned by the individual at will, she reasons, and is not required by a person's community and culture. The hijab, by contrast, is demanded by some fundamentalist cultures, and the woman donning it may feel coerced. For her bravery, Wilde-Blavatsky found herself drummed out of her feminist editorial collective.
This is of course endlessly debated -- just how much that coercion takes place, and just how much latitude women have to chose, and just how much "structural violence" there is in the "patriarchal society" and all that.
One might posit -- I'll bet there are some doing that! -- that the hoodie is just as much of a peer-pressure garb for a certain sub-culture as the hijab is for some Muslim communities -- indeed, it is such a cultural marker that Geraldo urged that young black men stop wearing hoodies if they didn't want to be taken for gangsters -- a call that was met with widespread derision.
I'm a defender of human rights and feminism, although I don't like the extreme identity-politics feminism rooted in Marxism. Marxism stresses classes and identities because it advocates revolutionary change and discards the rule of law, which it views as bourgeois. I don't view it that way. The rule of law is above individuals, groups, and states, and that's what we all need to ensure human rights and tolerance of dissent and differences.
Meredith vividly describes how the extreme feminists protested and blocked other feminists whose views they didn't like (such as the femmes in a butch-femme relationship), and how they excommunicated a feminist from the fold and kicked her off an editorial board over these issues. My God, that's never warranted.
The headscarf issue has really heated up with articles like Mona Eltahawy's piece in Foreign Policy. She is evidently among the Middle Eastern feminists who believes the headscarf/hijab/burquas are all coercive and should all be resisted.
But human rights activists, if they are true to their notions of civil liberties, have to concede that there might be women who want to don headscarves or even burquas freely, and that this is their right. Certainly we hear certain women leaders insist on this freedom in the Muslim world. I have heard Muslim women explain it to me as "a comfort level" where they want the right to feel covered. I have also heard Afghan women activists explain that the Taliban, however, has taken an original scriptural notion of wearing modest clothing so as not to appear provocative and has escalated this to a fully-covered body.
So what I think has to be done here is to challenge just how voluntary the headscarf or the hijab is, and resist efforts to "normalize it" -- which start with Western women refusing to be forced to put on headscarves just because they visit a country like Iran, even if they merely visit a mosque to meet with a religious figure in his office (this sort of thing has in fact been urged at times by overeager foreign service bureaucrats in some countries).
Here's how I know that at least some women want to have headscarves at least, and even the hijab. Because I see them in the United States among new immigrants. Ironically, since 9/11, I've seen far more Muslim men with beards and Muslim women with headscarves for a simple reason, I think: they are refugees from Islamic countries where the systems are so oppressive, and personal freedom and small business so unprotected, that they wish to flee. So despite 9/11, despite the increased levels of hate crimes against Muslims now (actually, the FBI statistics illustrate that Jews remain the group most targeted with hate crimes), they still want to emigrate here because their homelands have grown worse since 9/11. It's also a case of some rebellious youth of more secularized Muslim parents deciding to become more conservative as a form of defiance against the US culture and government, from which they feel alienated (this is a far more serious problem in France and other European countries, but I see it here, too).
How do you address these issues fairly?
Now, let's take my children's public high schools. They have rules that are very simple: no headgear. That means no hoodies, hats, caps, doo-rags, scarves. Period. Nothing on the head.
These rules were designed primarily to deal -- in these mainly all black and Hispanic public high schools -- with gang warfare. They want to eliminate totally the ability of boys in particular to flaunt their gang signs and gain recruitments and a greater sense of identity. The high school principals have all found that if they eliminate headgear, they get at a lot of the problem of flashing those signs.
They also want to be able to identify the kids who cause fights in lunchrooms, steal from other students or local merchants, and so on. So no hoodies, which, in combination with sunglasses, become very much cloaking of identity. No baseball caps, which more often than not are flipped off or thrown around and start fights where kids feel they've been "dissed". No doo-rags, those big clothes wrapped all over the head, or the skin-tight form of cap, or big scarves wrapped all around.
Now, does that mean that a Jewish boy can't wear a yarmulke? No, of course he can wear a small skull cap. For one, it's a religious item. For two, it doesn't cloak his identity.
Can a Sikh wear a head turban? There don't seem to be that many Sikhs, I've never seen them in the half a dozen city schools I've dealt with regularly from "left behind" failing schools to better schools. I've seen almost no Jewish kids in yarmulkes either, but they would be tolerated.
Now, you wonder, what about a Muslim girl in a headscarf?
The principals don't seem to have had an opportunity to test their "no headgear" policy on that one. If it was described as a religious head-dress, they would probably let it pass, especially for the pragmatic reason that it isn't girls getting into fights in the lunchroom, but boys. I'm not sure how they are dealing with this because it's not a widespread issue and never has become one. And if it became a demand, they would respond to it likely as a religious exception. After all, the purpose of the "no headgear" rule is to prevent gang warfare, create an atmosphere of discipline and help in identification.
I do know how the New York School of Dentistry, Hunter College and other colleges I can see in my area deal with headscarves: they simply allow them. Why not? If they are trim and in some cases pinned, they don't get in the way of equipment and there is no reason not to allow them at all.
The same for Fedex, Staples, and other big chain stores in New York City -- there are Muslim women in headscarves along with their store uniforms, and the management doesn't care. (Although Hertz Rent-a-Car in other states took on the demand for multiple breaks for prayer and insisted when confronted with a lawsuit that they fit into the state-mandated 15-minute breaks.)
As for BDSM, which is increasingly now referenced as a "choice" especially with all the attention given to the new book 50 Shades of Gray, here, I will challenge the effort of BDSM to normalize itself and inflict its values on the public commons. Coercion and slavery are not only immoral, they are illegal. Efforts by BDSM supporters to get the European Court of Human Rights to accept the notion that enslavement and beatings in the BDSM sub-culture were "voluntary" and therefore should be decriminalized simply failed. The ECHR wasn't buying it. The voluntary nature doesn't change the nature of the assault -- the bodily harm. Slavery isn't something they can sanction in the name of culture.
I've had a huge amount of experience debating this issue and dealing with it directly in the virtual online community of Second Life. And I have a rule for my own customers and I urge it on others: while you can concede people's privacy in their own homes, i.e. on their own servers, in their own private space, they cannot inflict their "norms" on the public commons. So no whipping and chaining people on the public square and in public meetings. And no telling me I'm intolerant because I don't want coercion and slavery to spread as a cultural "value". It's not a cultural value. It is a sub-culture to be tolerated as a private matter.
I'm reminded of an Ingush colleague I once had who was dismayed at the way the Chechen rebels seemed to suddenly get religion by the second Chechen war and demand that women stay out of the marketplace and don headscarves. Good Western liberal that I was, I hesitantly asked whether this wasn't in fact a cultural norm that they could understandably expect.
"It's not culture, but absence of culture," she said of their opportunism and misuse of religion to gain power.
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