The Melting Pot Beckons

LOS ANGELES, Calif.—I recently returned stateside from a trip to France and Holland where I was visiting family. Over the course of the trip, conversations with friends and relatives repeatedly turned to the president of France Nicolas Sarkozy’s declaration earlier this summer that the burqa “will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” Although the French have yet to issue an outright ban on wearing burqas in public, a bipartisan committee of 32 lawmakers has been dispatched to come up with ways to prevent women from donning the head-to-toe garments whose only aperture is veiled in mesh.

Everyone I spoke to—left-leaning, flexibly minded, young and middle-aged people—was, at least on the gut level, sympathetic to the ban. Yet, as abhorrent as the burqa is to me, the notion of legislating an outright ban was something that, with my American gut, I could not swallow.

What drives the opposition to burqas? Is it that Europeans feel the person wearing it is the victim of a mind-control culture that subjugates women, or is it that they find the presence of burqa-wearers to be a fundamental blight on European society and culture?

France and nearby countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy that have curtailed or given consideration to curtailing the presence of burqas in public have tended to conflate these two issues—individual as victim versus affront to society. The assumption among Europeans is that the onus is on the immigrant to conform to traditional European society. This sentiment is prevalent even among some politicians who are the sons and daughters of Muslim immigrants. The attitude is: “If you want to stay in our country, then adopt our customs, language, and values, or else go home.” These arguments, common currency now in Europe, used to be confined to extreme-right parties like that of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.

By contrast, the America that I knew growing up in California seemed to operate under different premises. What I have observed is a constantly evolving society that meets the immigrant halfway, thereby taking the edge off of the cultural confrontation and facilitating assimilation. What it has meant to be an American has been a work-in-progress for 200-plus years. Immigrants arriving here generally join family and/or move into ethnically congenial neighborhoods. They typically work in a commercial culture where, if need be, they can get by only dealing with their fellow countrymen. Television, radio, music, church services can all be consumed in their native language. Indeed virtually all one’s needs—from restaurants, supermarkets, and karaoke bars, to medical, legal, insurance and real estate services—are readily available in one’s mother tongue. Major cities such as New York and Los Angeles are as much or more about a polyglot patchwork of such self-contained ethnic communities as they are about anything that could be called a dominant culture. Indeed, even whatever could loosely be called a “dominant culture” derived from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, is like the croutons in a soup whose broth and flavor come from African-Americans, Jews, and other historically oppressed minorities. The immigrant can imagine him or herself adding spice to this soup. The melting pot beckons. The very ease with which one can defer assimilation in the United States seems to facilitate it. There are estimated to be 6.5 million Muslims in the United States but when was the last time you saw anybody wearing a burqa?

Contrast this accommodating attitude with France’s, a country with a more rigid traditional culture that is perceived to be under attack. Universities in Michigan last year installed footbaths in dormitories to meet the needs of Muslim students who washed their feet before praying. France, by contrast, outlawed headscarves (as well as yarmulkes and large crosses) in schools. And in spite of wide gaps in achievement and employment between Arab immigrants and the rest of France, affirmative action policies have never been implemented and remain deeply unpopular. The positions and arguments of left-wing politicians in France on the subject of affirmative action could be lifted verbatim from arguments of conservative purists in America, such as Supreme Court Justices Anthony Scalia or Clarence Thomas.

A similar contrast can be found on the issue of “mind control.”Swastikas, among other offensive symbols, are banned in many European countries. Scientology has failed to obtain religious recognition in France, Germany, and the UK, among others, and Greece has banned it altogether. The mind-control argument in relation to burqas is easy to make. Absent the expectations of fathers, brothers, and husbands, what woman would choose to wear a burqa ? It deprives them of ordinary human interaction and makes them wholly subservient to the men in their lives. Burqas, it can be argued, infringe on freedom of expression.

By contrast, the United States is not a society that protects its members against cults and perceived mind control. We tolerate the existence of skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan, flag burning, the swastika, and the hammer and sickle. We don’t interfere with the Amish, although their lifestyle represents a wholesale rejection of mainstream American society. We have a history of tolerating open expression of life-styles that are antithetical to mainstream values. Hippies in the 60’s were not only extremely objectionable to most of American society, but belligerent towards that society, and yet there were no serious bans on long hair and tie-dyed t-shirts.

Where to draw the line in the twenty-first century is by no means clear.

Some conflicts between Western values and traditional immigrant cultures will be easy calls, like footbinding, or East African immigrants who seek out doctors to perform genital mutilation on their daughters. Other issues, like burqas, are more problematic. Fundamental values, like gender or racial equality, need to be weighed against freedom of expression. Each country has to find its own balance between tolerance of immigrant cultures and preservation of its own distinctive national values and traditions.


Clay A. Dumas ’10, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.