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Liberal feminism and postcolonial difference: Debating headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany

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In this article, we analyze headscarf debates that unfolded in the first decade of the twenty-first century in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Through a socio-historical overview looking at newspaper articles and policy and legal documents, we show how the headscarf has become a site for negotiating immigrant-related, postcolonial difference. We argue that certain feminist understanding of gender liberation and postcolonial difference in the headscarf debates reveal the continuity of control mechanisms from the colonial to the postcolonial era. We highlight the possibilities for decolonial thought and practice by centering the situatedness of headscarf. This allows us to show how Muslim citizens are active participants in producing contemporary Western European histories even as some of their practices face overt rejection. Article 2 Social Compass 00(0) Résumé Dans cet article, nous analysons les débats sur le foulard qui se sont déroulés au cours de la première décennie du 21 e siècle en France, aux Pays-Bas et en Allemagne. Au travers d'un retour sur le contexte socio-historique examinant des articles de journaux, des documents politiques et juridiques, nous démontrons que le foulard est devenu un lieu de négociation de la différence post-coloniale des migrant·e·s. Nous soutenons qu'une certaine compréhension féministe de la libération des genres et de la différence postcoloniale dans les débats sur le foulard, révèle la continuité des mécanismes de contrôle de l'ère coloniale à l'ère postcoloniale. Nous soulignons les possibilités de la pensée et de la pratique décoloniale en nous concentrant sur l'intégration contextuelle du foulard. Cela nous permet de montrer les manières avec lesquelles les citoyen·ne·s musulman·e·s participent activement à la production des histoires contemporaines de l'Europe occidentale, même si certaines de leurs pratiques se heurtent à un rejet déclaré.
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Liberal feminism and
postcolonial difference:
Debating headscarves in
France, the Netherlands,
and Germany
Anna C KORTEWEG
University of Toronto, Canada
Gökçe YURDAKUL
Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
Abstract
In this article, we analyze headscarf debates that unfolded in the first decade of the
twenty-first century in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Through a socio-historical
overview looking at newspaper articles and policy and legal documents, we show how the
headscarf has become a site for negotiating immigrant-related, postcolonial difference.
We argue that certain feminist understanding of gender liberation and postcolonial
difference in the headscarf debates reveal the continuity of control mechanisms from
the colonial to the postcolonial era. We highlight the possibilities for decolonial thought
and practice by centering the situatedness of headscarf. This allows us to show how
Muslim citizens are active participants in producing contemporary Western European
histories even as some of their practices face overt rejection.
Keywords
France, gender, Germany, headscarf, Muslims, postcolonialism, The Netherlands
Corresponding author:
Gökçe Yurdakul, Berlin Institute of Migration and Integration Research, Institute of Social Sciences,
Humboldt University of Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany.
Email: gokce.yurdakul@sowi.hu-berlin.de
974268SCP0010.1177/0037768620974268Social CompassKorteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany
research-article2020
Article
2 Social Compass 00(0)
Résumé
Dans cet article, nous analysons les débats sur le foulard qui se sont déroulés au cours
de la première décennie du 21e siècle en France, aux Pays-Bas et en Allemagne. Au
travers d’un retour sur le contexte socio-historique examinant des articles de journaux,
des documents politiques et juridiques, nous démontrons que le foulard est devenu
un lieu de négociation de la différence post-coloniale des migrant·e·s. Nous soutenons
qu’une certaine compréhension féministe de la libération des genres et de la différence
postcoloniale dans les débats sur le foulard, révèle la continuité des mécanismes de
contrôle de l’ère coloniale à l’ère postcoloniale. Nous soulignons les possibilités de la
pensée et de la pratique décoloniale en nous concentrant sur l’intégration contextuelle
du foulard. Cela nous permet de montrer les manières avec lesquelles les citoyen·ne·s
musulman·e·s participent activement à la production des histoires contemporaines de
l’Europe occidentale, même si certaines de leurs pratiques se heurtent à un rejet déclaré.
Mots-clés
Allemagne, foulard, France, genre, musulman·e·s, Pays-Bas, postcolonialisme
Over the past decades, the headscarf has become a site for negotiating immigrant-related,
postcolonial difference in Western European countries, like France, the Netherlands and
Germany. In our work, we analyze how gender-based arguments have shaped varied
forms of headscarf regulation both through formal law and policy and informal everyday
interaction. We focus on how certain feminist understanding of gender liberation and
postcolonial difference in the headscarf debates reveal the continuity of control
mechanisms from the colonial to the postcolonial era. However, we do not solely focus
on colonialism’s continuities; we also highlight the possibilities for decolonial thought
and practice by centering the situatedness of the headscarf (Bhambra, 2014; Lugones,
2010; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Sheth, 2006). This allows us to show how Muslim
citizens are active participants in producing contemporary Western European histories
even as some of their practices face overt rejection.
To understand the link between liberal and other forms of feminisms, ideals of gender
liberation, postcolonial trajectories, and decolonizing possibilities, we turn to France, the
Netherlands, and Germany as three countries that witnessed intense public debate
regarding wearing the headscarf during the first decade of this century (also see Amiraux,
2013).1 During this first decade, liberal feminists in all three countries equated
headscarves with gender inequality and influenced the shape of formal headscarf
regulations, albeit with different results for each country. In addition, feminist
interpretations shaped public perception of the meaning of the headscarf.
In our analysis of these debates, we join a group of scholars who highlight how
immigrant-related postcolonial difference is rejected by mobilizing a narrow interpretation
of gender equality (Dahinden et al., 2020; El-Tayeb, 2011; Keskinen, 2019; Mishra,
2013). Our contribution to this scholarship is to analyze the role of Western liberal
feminist interlocuters in the headscarf debates that took place at the beginning of this
century and to illuminate the role of such feminists in the regulation of postcolonial
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 3
difference. At the same time, we foreground the contributions of headscarf-wearing
women’s decolonial projects, to show how they introduce new European subjectivities
and disrupt the colonial power of a Western liberal feminist narrative of Muslim women
as ‘victims’ (also see Vanzan, 2016).
Below, we will first provide a brief description of the headscarf regulation in the three
countries, then discuss our framework for integrating postcolonial and decolonial
approaches into the headscarf literature, and give an overview of our methodologies. We
then apply the conceptual framework we develop in the first part of the article to analyze
news media and political debate in each country in turn, highlighting the impact of
postcolonial trajectories on the gendered racialized production of difference and
concomitant decolonial possibilities. We conclude that liberal feminists and other
feminist-inspired interlocutors have been instrumental in regulating postcolonial
difference in all three countries albeit with different strategies. At the same time, we
show that European Muslim women find decolonial possibilities that refuse colonial/
postcolonial narratives.
Regulating the headscarf: postcolonial difference and
decolonizing possibilities in the early 2000s
Postcolonial politics in France, the Netherlands, and Germany have been shaped by
differing colonial histories reflected in contemporary diverse Muslim populations from
colonies, like Algeria, or from migrant-sending countries, like Turkey or Morocco (which
themselves need to be read against postcolonial trajectories of labor-importing states)
(Albrecht, 2011). Unlike the other two countries, Germany did not have overseas
colonies, which may suggest that postcoloniality has only limited effect in contemporary
politics. Instead, we argue that though each nation state has specific historical colonial
relationships, in the contemporary era, postcoloniality traverses Western Europe and
becomes the interpretive lens for the perceived practices of Muslim inhabitants (Foroutan,
2019; Purtschert, 2019).
Colonial/postcolonial practices are expressed in different domains of formal regulation
in the three countries under study: in France, headscarf-wearing has been regulated
through lawmaking, while in the Netherlands and Germany, the early 2000s saw the
application and interpretation of existing law in both restrictive and inclusive ways. In
France, the targets initially were elementary and high school students – where schools
are the sites of citizenship production in the French republic (Amiraux, 2009; Bowen,
2008; Scott, 2007). In 2004, France famously passed a law banning students’ wearing of
headscarves in elementary and high schools. In the Netherlands, the field of formal
regulation has been very dispersed. Rather than a focus on efforts to create new laws
(though those did exist), the headscarf was largely regulated through bottom-up conflict
in multiple domains of school, university, leisure, sport, and government (Roggeband
and Lettinga, 2016). Advisory rulings of the precursor to the Dutch Commission for
Human Rights often protected the right of women to cover themselves but pressures to
limit that right continue to be exerted throughout all domains of social life. In Germany,
the Constitutional Court has been the primary actor, regulating headscarf-wearing among
teachers, and devolving the specifics of that regulation to individual states (von
Blumenthal, 2009). While initial regulation focused on prohibiting teachers from wearing
4 Social Compass 00(0)
a headscarf, Germany has also seen some debate about headscarf-wearing women’s
employment more generally. Across the three countries, liberal feminist arguments that
model women’s liberation on a normative White European woman structured regulation
(Delphy, 2015; Ferree, 2012; Moors, 2011). Such forms of feminism are rooted in what
Rottenberg (2014) describes as ‘classic liberal feminism whose raison d’être was to . . .
[reveal] the gendered exclusions within liberal democracy’s proclamation of universal
equality, particularly with respect to the law, institutional access, and the full incorporation
of women into the public sphere’ (p. 419). While feminism expresses itself different in
each country (see Ferree, 2012; Scott, 2007), the basic tenet of treating a form of gender
equality rooted in the experiences of white, middle-class women as the goal of liberation
cuts across our cases.
In addition to formal regulation, headscarf-wearing women in all three countries
witnessed informal, everyday regulation through the development of discursive
repertoires that interpreted the meaning of headscarf-wearing in everyday life, often in
negative ways (see Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2014). Contemporary public discourse
foregrounded three dimensions of postcolonial difference. First, the headscarf highlighted
a particularly gendered way for women to present their bodies in the public sphere
(Gökariksel and Secor, 2014). The headscarf’s marking of gender difference received
scrutiny because of a perception that the headscarf indicated a denial of underlying
equality between the sexes; seen from the outside, wearing the headscarf was often
interpreted as a form of submission that signals that Muslim women were unequal both
to Muslim men and to ‘Western’ women (Moors, 2009; Scott, 2007). Note that gender
equality remains undefined in these articulations of gendered submission (see also
Korteweg, 2017). Second, in the European context, headscarf-wearers were racialized,
as people perceived the headscarf as a sign of belonging to a minority group that was
ethnically or racially differentiated from the majority in ways that rendered these
populations inferior as a result of colonial histories (Ahmed, 2011; Moors, 2011; Scott,
2007). Finally, headscarf-wearing represented a religiosity, Islam, which was increasingly
seen as a threat to the political stability of Western European countries (Amiraux, 2013).
Indeed, during the decade under study, those with roots in Muslim majority countries
were increasingly portrayed as Muslims, rather than as people originating in countries
such as Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, and other countries with predominantly Muslim
populations. With this transition to understanding immigrants as Muslims, came an
approach to headscarf-wearing in which apparently universal values rooted in gender
and sameness came to inform racialized understandings of women’s agency and liberation
(Mohanty, 1984). At the same time, the headscarf became a symbol not only of the
private oppression of Muslim women but also the public’s fear of ‘Islamization’ and
terror (Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2014).
The colonial roots of postcolonial trajectories: the case
of headscarf
Why has the headscarf attracted such intense debate? We join a long list of authors who
argue that the headscarf becomes a piece of cloth upon which to project the tensions of
our postcolonial situation (Scott, 2007; Sheth, 2006; Yeğenoğlu, 1998). Indeed, as Asad
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 5
(1993) argues, contemporary regulations of Muslim symbols in the public sphere in
Europe are an extension of the violence of colonizer in the colonial history. A typical
binary in colonial discourse is the universalized representation of sovereign Western
women in opposition to Muslim women victimized by their religious communities
(Mohanty, 1984; Yeğenoğlu, 1998). Veiling is the epitome of this victimization; colonial
forces already presented veiling as a symbol of gendered oppression and ordered for its
regulation (Ahmed, 2011). Ahmed (1992) discusses the cultural and religious
transformation initiated by British colonial forces in Egypt that paved the way to
removing of veils. Ahmed describes this colonial time as the British introduction of
modernization and industrialization to Egypt, which simultaneously created a social
transformation and deep sense of moral inferiority through racializing colonialized
populations. This racialization was deeply gendered, as Western liberal feminism’s
expression in Egypt failed to take the situatedness of gender liberation into account
(Ahmed, 1992: 151). Similarly, in her historical analysis of French colonialism in
Algeria, Scott (2007) shows that under French rule, Algerian women had to cast off
their veils in 1830. Taking off the veil was a sign of gender liberation and being civilized
simultaneously.
This colonial style of governing through the binary logic of racialized natives versus
civilized Europeans was soon adopted by the local ruling elite in these Muslim countries.
Local ruling leaders enforced their power by emulating colonial elites, joining in
civilizing projects of leaving the veil behind and adopting ‘European’ style of clothing
(Ahmed, 1992; Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2014; Scott, 2007). Thus, local leaders built on
both local practices of oppression and new colonial modalities: Mernissi (1987) aptly
showed how male ‘ulama’ in Morocco used religious texts in order to strengthen their
dominant position, especially toward Muslim women (see also Mir-Hosseini et al.,
2015). As such, women in Muslim countries have dealt with gendered oppression through
the local patriarchy and then through the colonizers.
Although we observe a common historical thread of a forceful colonization in the
literature, Mohanty (1984) criticized the depiction of ‘Third World’ women as victims of
colonialism. By giving examples from struggles of women to overcome colonial rule,
she showed that feminist struggle had been present in the ‘Third World’ long before
‘Western’ feminists struggled for their own rights. Analogously, Ahmed (1992) shows
the irony of British colonizers exporting gender equality to Egypt while jailing suffragettes
in Britain. Today, many Muslim countries have strong feminist movements, which are
anti-colonial and anti-government (Mutluer, 2019). These are part of the histories that
Muslim women who immigrated to Europe bring with them and pass on to the next
generations of Muslim women who are born in European countries.
Decolonizing the headscarf: politics of refusal
In the contemporary era, we witness how gendered headscarf regulations of colonial rule
are transformed into new regulations of immigrant integration. In the postcolonial
context, ‘civilization’ is replaced with ‘immigrant integration’ or ‘social cohesion’
discourses that inscribe an equation between headscarf-wearing and gender oppression
(Korteweg, 2017). However, by highlighting the postcolonial continuities of headscarf
6 Social Compass 00(0)
regulation, we risk privileging the colonial perspective without paying attention to what
gets lost in the colonial/postcolonial binary (Chakrabarty, 2000).
For many Muslim women who are second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe,
headscarf-wearing represents a politics of refusal (Emejulu, 2019; Simpson, 2014). Their
headscarf is not their mother’s traditional headscarf anymore, it is also not the Muslim
woman’s oppression, as liberal feminists would argue (Ast and Spielhaus, 2012; Sheth,
2006; Zimmerman, 2015). Muslim women redefined the meaning of their headscarves in
the European public postcolonial context after their family’s migratory experiences. As a
redefined gendered symbol, Muslim women’s headscarf offers an opportunity to
recognize the colonial/postcolonial trajectory of this symbol, to embrace self-
determination over Muslim women’s own bodies, and to enact quests of inclusion as full
citizens in European countries (Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2014; also see Al-Kazi and
Gonzalez, 2018 for a quest for social mobility).
Indigenous scholar Audra Simpson develops the concept of a ‘politics of refusal’ to
articulate how Haudenosaunee (and other Indigenous peoples in Canada) reject the
sovereignty of the Canadian state in conditions where that rejection is also always to
some degree impossible (Simpson, 2014). Her politics of refusal center on a rejection of
settler colonial sovereignty. We link this to the very different circumstances of postcolonial
subjects in European sovereign space: rather than continuing to perceive subjects from
former colonies through a lens of interloper, visitor, or person who is not yet but can
become European, we argue that these subjects are fully part of the European project,
rooted as that project is in colonialism. At the same time, the refusal to participate in
civilizing projects (as articulated through social cohesion or integration language) signals
an attempt to refuse the post/colonial imaginary that shapes contemporary politics of
postcolonial difference.
In each country, different spaces for such refusal open up. As citizens of Europe,
Muslim women’s political activities make the headscarf a European symbol and engage
in a decolonization process that offers a multivalent challenge to postcolonial politics of
repression. At the same time, some Muslim women act as ‘codebreakers’, or women who
take up a position as representing ‘authentic’ voices from Muslim communities (see
Bracke, 2011; De Jong, 2017; Yurdakul, 2010). They join liberal feminists who work in
consort with governments to address gender equality issues in ways that mimic colonial
uses of gender equality and that reinforce a particular understanding of postcolonial
difference.
Methods
To analyze the ways in which contemporary headscarf regulations reveal the workings of
colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial power, we analyzed three main sources of data:
newspaper reporting, government documents including parliamentary debates and
commission reports, and court decisions (see Table 1 for a description of the data). In
each country, we chose newspapers that cover the range of class positions and political
outlooks in public and political debate. We gathered the data by searching for the words
voile islamique (Islamic veil) and foulard islamique (Islamic scarf) in the French case,
hoofddoek (headscarf) and boerka (burqa) in the Dutch one, and Kopftuch (headscarf)
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 7
and Burka (burqa) in the German case. These were the key terms used in public debate
(in the subsequent decade, debates included niqab as well but this term was not the focus
in earlier debates). Note that the analysis we present in this article highlights debates on
the headscarf, not face coverings. In the French case, we then tried to narrow this down
by adding ‘femme(s)’ or ‘fille(s)’ but this did not reduce the number of articles by more
than 5%. In addition, we looked at a variety of government and legal documents in each
country case. We also conducted a few very targeted interviews in the Netherlands and
Germany to talk to outspoken pro-headscarf activists, because their voices are
underrepresented in the media debate. The data gathered for each country differed
somewhat in order to reflect the sites in which regulation took place – rather than
imposing uniformity on our data gathering efforts, we chose to gather the most
comprehensive set of data for each country case.
Our data analysis follows practices associated with the extended case method,
combining inductive and deductive approaches (Burawoy, 1998). Sorting through all
newspaper articles, government documents, and court decisions, we first identified the
main themes of these texts inductively. In each country, we focused explicitly on gender
politics, highlighting the participation of women’s organizations in debates about
regulation and foregrounding arguments overtly rooted in feminist tradition or history.
We identified which self-identified feminist actors and interlocutors engage in the
debates in order to capture both claims-making discourses and practices of engagement.
Finally, we pay particularly close attention to the contributions of European Muslim
women, given a postcolonial politics of overlooking their active contributions to change
in European societies.
Table 1. Data sources.
Media (1996–2011) Government documents
(2004–2015)
Court decisions
(2003–2015)
France Le Monde (404 articles,
2003–2009); Le Figaro
(607 articles, 1996–2009)
Stasi Commission
Report (2003); Gerin
Commission
Report (2010)
The
Netherlands
NRC (172 articles);
Trouw (177 articles);
Telegraaf (132 articles);
Volkskrant (131 articles)
(2003–2011)
Tweede Kamer
(Parliamentary)
discussions and
parliamentary questions
(120 documents from
1995–2011)
159 decisions
by the Equal
Treatment
Commission
(1994–2012)
Germany Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (FAZ) (393
articles, 2004–2011); Taz
(415 articles, 2004–2011);
Süddeutsche Zeitung (104
articles, 2004–2011); Bild
(2006–2010, 169 articles)
German Islam
Conference
(2009–2015) (102 texts)
Bundestag discussions
on the headscarf
(Plenary protocols)
BVerfG 2 BvR
1436/02 BVerfG
v. 27.01.2015 – 1
BvR 471/10
FAZ: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
8 Social Compass 00(0)
Findings: debating the headscarf in France, the
Netherlands, and Germany
France
French headscarf politics exemplify an alliance between postcolonial codebreakers and
feminists. Prominent women associated with various NGOs and government-funded
women’s advocacy organizations drew on the image of the vulnerable Muslim girl or
woman to demonstrate that Islam is inherently hostile to women (Billaud and Castro, 2013).
The anti-violence women’s organization Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (Neither Whores, nor
Submissives, NPNS) located in the highly diverse postcolonial banlieues of Paris was a
particularly important generator of discourses that reinforced this interpretation of the
relationship between Islam and women’s oppression (Lépinard, 2014). NPNS became a
powerful interlocutor for government, especially in the anti-headscarf lawmaking undertaken
in 2003.2 NPNS was founded by Fadela Amara and Samira Bellil, both of Muslim
background, to address violence against women and girls in the banlieues. NPNS saw Islam
as condoning such violence and argued that girls wore the headscarf as protection from the
boys and men that harassed, attacked, and raped them (see also Weil, 2008). Amara (who
later became a minister in Sarkozy’s government) promoted forbidding the headscarf in
schools: ‘I do not accept that we should tolerate the veil under the pretext of respecting the
cultures from which it originates’ (Amara cited in Le Monde, 8 March 2005).3
The participation of women who represent postcoloniality in feminist politics is
illustrated by the actions of Gisele Halimi, a woman of Tunisian-Muslim and Jewish
descent and a prominent writer, lawyer, and activist. As president of Choisir la cause des
femmes, a pro-choice organization she co-founded with Simone de Beauvoir and others
in 1971, she focused an op-ed on what she posited as the source of the problem with the
headscarf – Islam:
The veil is a terrible symbol of women’s inferiorization. I don’t need to elaborate – this is
precisely the way it’s intended by the Koran. Defined in relation to man, to his desires, to his
compulsions, the woman must hide all that could seduce, that could indicate sexual transgression.
(Le Monde, 24 October 2003)
Halimi allied herself with organizations like NPNS to portray Islam as a threat to
Muslim women. As someone of Tunisian descent, engaged in organizations that have ties
to various government apparatuses, Halimi articulated a simplistic and uniform meaning
of the headscarf. Drawing on a liberal feminist discourse, Halimi aligned herself with
restrictive headscarf regulations as an ‘emancipatory’ project, strongly echoing French
colonial practice in Tunisia. This approach disregards the postcolonial context in which
the headscarf gains new meanings.
We then see how the arguments of codebreakers like Amara, Bellil, and Halimi
dovetail with pronouncements by leaders of prominent women’s organization to inform
a consensus that there is no way to understand the headscarf as anything but a symbol of
oppression. For example, Anne Vigerie and Anne Zelensky, both leaders of prominent
women’s organizations, wrote,
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 9
The headscarf ‘symbolizes women’s place in Islam as it is understood by Islamism. This place
is in the shadows, relegated, in submission to men. The fact that women claim it as their
decision does nothing to change its meaning . . . There is no surer oppression than self-
oppression’. (Le Monde, 30 May 2003)
Vigerie and Zelensky invigorated liberal feminism which projects the Western
portrayal of gender inequality (seen as women’s submission to men) onto Muslim
communities. They unapologetically spoke on behalf of oppressed women they believed
were unable to speak as independent subjects, and denied Muslim women’s capacity to
resist such interpretations of the postcolonial context.
Thus, prominent feminist French activists, Muslim, Arab, and others positioned
themselves as knowledgeable about Islam and capable of interpreting the Koran for the
general public. They gave depictions of Islamic practice as unitary and oppressive to
women, despite a body of research that documents far more nuanced and diverse
interpretations of the headscarf in France (Bloul, 1996; Gaspard and Khosrokhavar,
1995; Killian, 2003; Laxer, 2019; Parvez, 2017; Scott, 2007; Winter, 2008). From this
vantage point, they advocated for the abolishment of the headscarf in elementary and
high schools. Their discourses show the paradox of liberal feminism: Muslim women are
actively self-oppressing by wearing headscarves, but government’s oppressions or the
silencing of headscarf-wearing women during the making of regulations and policies that
affect their religious practices goes unquestioned. The continuities of colonialism/
postcolonialism are striking.
In France, feminists directly influenced lawmaking processes: prominent politicians
drew on arguments that the headscarf should be banned from schools in order to protect
women’s equality and agency. However, these same politicians then turned these
discourses back in on themselves to promote unveiling as a way to ensure that women
would properly mother the next generation of French citizens. For example, Dominique
Perben, French Minister of Justice argued: ‘To accept the veil is to accept a conception
of woman that is fundamentally contrary to her dignity . . . Any solution must take the
equality of the sexes to heart’, concluding ‘social integration occurs through women’ (Le
Monde, 16 November 2003). The notion that women facilitate their children’s integration
into French society pointed to a key paradox in French gender politics: the unquestioned
assumption of women’s primary role in parenting and the attendant reinscription of
gender difference (see also Scott, 2007).
Echoing the image of the colonial subject depicted by Vigerie and Zelensky, only two
headscarf-wearing women were among those interviewed by the Stasi commission that
developed the 2004 ban on headscarf-wearing in schools. These women were chastised
by Commission members for wearing the scarf (Laxer, 2019). Even before the Stasi
Commission published its findings, Bernard Stasi suggested to the French media that
young women frequently wore the veil ‘because their parents, older brothers and religious
groups obligate them to do so’ (Le Monde, 2 November 2003). Patrick Weil, a historian
of citizenship and member of the Stasi Commission, stated that the argument that girls
wore the veil to protect themselves from the sexual aggression of boys and men in the
banlieues had a particularly strong influence on that Commission’s recommendations
(Weil, 2008: 2707). Politicians were taken with Muslim women’s testimony against the
10 Social Compass 00(0)
headscarf, and the NPNS and Amara were among the most-cited referents in the
parliamentary debates (Bowen, 2008: 137). Through adopting the colonial discourse of
saving Muslim women from Muslim men, liberal feminism informed the exclusion of
Muslim headscarf-wearing French women from educational institutions and meaningful
participation in public debate.
Yet, even in France, where the ties between feminist interlocutors and government
informed highly restrictive laws, we see decolonial challenges through a politics of refusal
that started in French schools and streets. For example, in 2003, Alma and Lila Lévy,
13-year-old twin sisters, became pro-headscarf activists after being denied entry to their
high school as they adopted their French-Algerian mother’s religion. They demonstrated
that they had freely chosen to wear the scarf, directly contradicting the link between
religious expression and gender oppression, and managed to gain significant media
attention. Similarly, debates on the eventual passage of the 2004 Stasi law that prohibited
headscarf-wearing in elementary and high schools led to large street protests with young
women taking up slogans like, ‘The veil, my choice’ that was front page news. Such
slogans reinterpret the politics of headscarf-wearing in the language of liberal feminism
while also subverting that language. Yet, voices like those of the Levy sister and protestors
in the street were not taken seriously in the halls of government and these European
Muslim women’s interventions did not prevent the passage of restrictive laws.
The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, too, we see the influence of codebreakers. Formal regulation through
the law was far more ad hoc than in France and had less restrictive results. For example,
over its 18-year existence between 1994 and 2012, 159 cases came before the Equal
Treatment Commission (ETC). This body made advisory rulings based on laws defining
equality, and rights to freedom of expression and religion until 2012 when that task was
taken over by the newly formed Commission for Human Rights. The ETC tended to view
headscarf-wearing as a form of religious expression protected by laws of state neutrality
in religion. A number of the ETC’s cases were broadly discussed in the Dutch media
where outspoken Dutch Muslim women echoed French feminists by linking the headscarf
to women’s oppression.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who became a Dutch citizen, was directly engaged
in government as a parliamentarian for the right-liberal governing VVD party and their
spokesperson on immigrant integration. In an opinion piece, she argued that the laws in
place should be tightened to enable the Dutch state to restrict headscarf-wearing. Like
French feminists, Hirsi Ali fulfilled the role of an authentic voice of a Muslim
‘codebreaker’ as she argued that women wear headscarves in order to avoid men’s lust
(NRC, 13 April 2004). Hirsi Ali further asserted that Muslim women who try to free
themselves from this oppressive interpretation of their sexuality, body, and personhood
risked extreme violence by family members ‘hell-bent’ on enforcing these norms (Hirsi
Ali quoted in NRC, 13 April 2004). As a parliamentarian, Hirsi Ali engaged in efforts to
eradicate headscarf-wearing in Dutch society.
Naema Tahir, a Dutch Muslim columnist and lawyer, also put forth the headscarf as a
symbol of women’s subordination but she granted headscarf-wearing women a form of
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 11
agency. In one column, Tahir responded to French demonstrations against the headscarf
ban. She wrote, ‘It must feel very powerful, my sister’ to participate in making the
headscarf ‘one of the most complicated pieces of clothing of our time’ (NRC, 24 January
2004). Like Hirsi Ali, Tahir drew on the legitimacy conferred by her own childhood to
explain her understanding of the headscarf to a largely non-Muslim Dutch audience. She
wrote that wearing a headscarf as a teen in Pakistan, she toyed with men’s sexual attention
while overtly adhering to strictures of modesty:
My headscarf became a culturally determined expression of how I could express my sensuality,
[a way to get revenge on] my uncles and nephews, who in their tight western jeans, dictated
how ‘their women’ should act, even though they did not restrict themselves in anything. (NRC,
24 January 2004)
Thus, both Hirsi Ali and Tahir re-used common colonial tropes about Muslim men as
exploitative and of Muslim women in need of liberation from those men through
unveiling projects (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Razack, 2004). Neither Hirsi Ali nor Tahir,
whose roots are in Somalia and Pakistan, respectively, represented former Dutch colonies,
but both embodied the postcolonial foreign in the Dutch imaginary and both strategically
used their background of growing up religiously Muslim to explain to a presumed non-
Muslim audience why they should fear the headscarf.
Tahir differed from Hirsi Ali in that she introduced the notion of an agentic Muslim
woman, claiming that she believed that young Dutch Muslim women wear the headscarf as
A statement against Western society . . . a counterweight to the peer pressure in your own circle
and as the winning prize: keeping the imam, your brother, your father and the jerk-calling-you-
whore around the corner at bay. (NRC, 24 January 2004)
Yet, in this, she also echoed French feminists’ claims that there is no agency possible
when adopting the headscarf’s presumed oppression. For Tahir, this was a delusion on
the part of these women, not a true act of liberation.
The impact of such representations was profound. The Dutch Green Left Party has
had one of the stronger track records of inclusivity when it comes to Dutch migration
politics. Yet, Femke Halsema’s, then leader of the Dutch Green Party (who in 2018
became mayor of Amsterdam), statements on the headscarf shows the impact of
positioning Muslim women in alignment with tropes of colonial victims on her thinking
about the headscarf. In 2009, Halsema gave a much-discussed interview with De Pers (a
free daily with a circulation of 200,000 published between January 2007 and March
2012), where she stated,
You can’t force women’s emancipation from above. It has to come from the women themselves.
. . . But that does not mean I do not have difficulty with the headscarf. I can’t wait for the
moment in which they fling off their scarves in freedom, I would most prefer to see every
woman in the Netherlands without a headscarf. (De Pers, 8 September 2009)
Halsema’s inability to imagine that women may find freedom in the headscarf and her
visceral discomfort at sitting next to headscarf-wearing women (see also Moors, 2009)
12 Social Compass 00(0)
resulted in an account showing a uniform path toward women’s liberation: through
feminism that tolerated Dutch headscarf-wearing women only insofar as exposure to
Dutch values and practices of tolerance would have salutary effects where, in time,
headscarf-wearing women, bolstered by Dutch egalitarianism, were presumed to fight
for their own liberation from the scarf. The possibility of decolonizing thought and
practice in which headscarf-wearing women can be full members of polity and society is
not possible in such accounts.
Rejecting such interpretations, Dutch Muslim feminist activists created decolonial
political projects to carve out public places for themselves, which addressed the ways in
which headscarf debates excluded them from the Dutch economy and society. Leyla
Çakir was a non-headscarf-wearing leader of an organization for Dutch Muslim women.
Her organization created a series of posters that proclaimed the headscarf ‘Really Dutch’,
inspired by the utterances of Dutch ultra-right politician Geert Wilders who had made
extremely disparaging remarks about the headscarf. Nora el-Jebli was one of a small
group who, in 2009, started the Polder Moslima Headscarf Brigade (PMHB) in response
to what they perceived as the real problem of the headscarf: persistent labor market
discrimination, particularly among headscarf-wearing women aspiring to professional
positions. The PMHB made the news when they awarded the ‘silver headscarf’ to the
employer most welcoming of headscarf-wearing employees (a supermarket chain).
Finally, Fatima Elatik embodied new possibilities when she became the first headscarf-
wearing Amsterdam borough president (stadsdeelraadvoorzitter), governing a section of
Amsterdam with 112,000 inhabitants, supervising a staff of one thousand. In our
interview, Elatik said she was tired of being asked to explain the headscarf she could not
imagine being without – ‘I am so much more than that scarf!’ Yet, this scarf powerfully
symbolized decolonizing possibilities for a European, Muslim, gendered subject.
Unlike in France, where the interventions of headscarf-wearing women and girls were
discounted as non-agentic, in the Netherlands, these three public figures embodied an
embedded, agentic Muslim womanhood, providing a counterweight to postcolonial
representations of the headscarf as signaling women’s subordination. These women
refused to be defined through post/colonial tropes of victimization and by defining new
forms of political subjectivity engaged in decolonial political projects.
Germany
As in the Netherlands, codebreaker women, who presented an ‘authentic’ voice, actively
engaged in formal politics took a leadership role in arguing against the right to wear a
headscarf. In early January 2004, 3000 Muslim women protested on behalf of Fereshta
Ludin, the woman whose attempts to become a headscarf-wearing public school teacher
had been thwarted by the Constitutional Court. Discounting the protestors’ claims, Lale
Akgün, Bundestag member for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Turkish descent (in
our interview with her, she said that she does not identify as Muslim but as secular Turk)
and then the SPD’s spokesperson on issues related to Islam, stated,
It is absurd to declare the clear subordination under a symbol of gender separation as
emancipation and to see this in principle as the normal case of female Muslim existence. [Those
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 13
who really want] emancipation in the sense of the Enlightenment and of humanism will
critically watch a headscarf discourse that does not concern the individual Muslim woman, but
rather the religious-cultural power of interpretation within Islam. (Taz, 24 January 2004)4
As privileged explainer of Muslim culture to the larger German public, Akgün argued
that the headscarf represented women’s subordination while marking Islam itself as
undemocratic. Thus, Akgün developed a German iteration of the notion that the state is
responsible for women’s emancipation while disregarding women’s own definitions of
their liberation.
As in the French case, such liberal feminist arguments resonated in statements of
powerful non-Muslim politicians. SPD President of the German Parliament Wolfgang
Thierse contrasted Christianity with Islam and argued that the state ‘fundamentally has
the duty to be neutral toward all religions. [However] a cross is not a symbol of oppression,
while the headscarf is for many Muslim women’ (FAZ , 4 January 2004). Where Akgün
turned to a Western-defined humanism, Thierse clearly rooted his understanding of
freedom within an interpretation of Christianity that discounted its own oppressive
practices. However, both reinforced colonial understanding of difference as lack and
backwardness.
The politics around Fereshta Ludin’s failed attempt to be a public school teacher
while wearing a headscarf also generated an unusual moment in which non-Muslim
politicians drew on feminist arguments to generate a counter-narrative to the postcolonial
declarations of Muslim woman’s victimhood (Ludin and Abed, 2015). Barbara John
and Rita Süssmuth of the CDU and Marieluise Beck of the Green Party expressed a
commitment to gender equality rights in which women should have the freedom to
define their own religious expression. In an open letter, they wrote, ‘A ban of the
headscarf [for teachers], . . . would be gender-specific, would be a religiously-based
discrimination, which amounts in practice to a complete exclusion from a profession’
(Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BpB), 2005). Rather than calling on the state to
protect women from the oppression signified by the headscarf, these three politically
powerful women called on the state to refrain from making religious distinctions that
would disproportionately affect (Muslim) women, therefore calling the politicians to
take the immigrant-related difference into account for the sake of fostering immigrant
integration. However, their attempts to refuse a postcolonial politics that reinforces
colonial tropes of victimhood were ignored and the 2004 Ludin decision made it
impossible to teach and wear a headscarf. The decision of the Constitutional Court on
headscarf ban in schools was overturned a decade later when a different group of judges
entered the court.
As in France and the Netherlands, prominent women with a migrant background in a
Muslim majority country shaped public discourse through general proclamations against
the headscarf (Noll, 2010). Necla Kelek (2005), a Turkish immigrant to Germany, made
her name as a sociologist with intimate knowledge of Turkish communities in Germany
through the publication of her 2005 bestseller The foreign bride (Die Fremde Braut).
Kelek has often been invited to serve on government committees regarding integration,
women’s rights, and Islam, including a seat in an important state advisory board, the
German Islam Conference, even though she has distanced herself from being Muslim
14 Social Compass 00(0)
(Hernández Aguilar, 2018). Echoing French debates on the place of students’ headscarves
in schools, Kelek used the German Islam Conference as a platform to argue:
On this point, the Basic Law [Constitution] is very clear. As of the age of 14, a person reaches
the age of discretion in the matter of religion. It is for this reason that I say that the headscarf
cannot exist in primary schools. The headscarf turns girls into sexual beings before they reach
puberty; their ‘right to a childhood’ is taken away. This is not compatible with our society,
which needs equal, self-assertive, and responsible citizen. Whoever forces a headscarf on little
girls, abuses the principle of freedom of religion. (Deutsche Islam Konferenz, 14 April 2009)
By focusing on children, persons incapable of consent, Kelek (2019), like her Dutch
codebreaking counterparts, reinforced images of Muslim families as violent toward their
children and rooted the oppression of Muslim women in childhood. Kelek advocated for
a French-style ban on headscarves for children under 14, which is the age of confirmation
in most Catholic Churches, and therefore a presumed age of consent for teens.
Drawing on Germany’s painful history with the Holocaust is a powerful way to attract
public attention, specifically on the debates on minorities and immigrants (Yurdakul,
2006). Schwarzer, the founding editor of women’s magazine Emma provocatively argued
in an interview,
The headscarf is the flag of Islamism. The headscarf is a sign that makes women into others,
into second-class humans. As a symbol, it is a form of ‘marking’, akin to the yellow star.
(Schwarzer cited in FA Z , 4 July 2006; see also Schwarzer, 2011)
Schwarzer implied that Muslim women are pressured by their families to wear
headscarves, just like the Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear yellow stars. Thus, she
insinuated that Muslim women are subjected to eradication, just as Jews had been during
WWII, evoking an extreme account of being outside civilization. Schwarzer’s
pronouncements shifted Germany’s everyday discursive repertoire on the Holocaust in
new directions, even as her analogies were widely criticized as inappropriate. Regardless
of their criticism, many interlocutors, especially many German liberal feminists (both
Muslim and non-Muslim), hewed to a narrow interpretation of women’s oppression,
rooted in colonial representations of postcolonial difference, with many seeing headscarf-
wearing women as victims of oppression (Taz, 23 July 2004; Ta z, 19 October 2006; Taz,
20 August 2009).
Some German Muslim women disrupted the connections made across anti-headscarf
arguments, in which liberal feminism provides both a clear-cut analysis of the headscarf
as oppressing women and a clear-cut solution, namely that it should be banned (see also
Amiraux, 2003; Nyhagen, 2017). For example, Die Zeit reported that Saliha Kubilay, a
young Muslim woman, asked Schwarzer during a public discussion at a university,
‘Where in the feminist movement did you stop progressing so as to fail to grasp to this
day that Islamic feminism has been long present in Germany?’ (Die Zeit, 26 January
2011). Kubilay showed how postcoloniality inflects Germany’s headscarf debates: By
intervening through a decolonial approach to claim feminism her own, Kubilay suggests
that feminism is not a product or possession of the West (Rinaldo, 2014). Fereshta Ludin,
the subject of the first laws restricting headscarf-wearing in Germany offered yet a
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 15
different take on feminism, arguing that she did not fight to wear her headscarf, but for
self-determination over her own body (Ludin quoted in the daily German newspaper
Tagesspiegel, 7 August 2013). She claimed her own liberation, refusing to be emancipated
through liberal feminism that echoed colonial tropes that equated uncovering with
freedom. These long-standing colonial tropes of unveiling women as liberation (Ahmed,
2011; Scott, 2007) were clearly powerful in German debates.
Conclusion
In our research, we show discursive trends that millions of Muslim women living in
European countries must take off their headscarves in order to adopt a Western liberal
feminist understanding of gender liberation. Although the place of religion and toleration
of minority religions vary in secular countries in Europe for historical, legal, and political
reasons, as we show in our data analysis, postcolonial difference is still represented as a
foreign, backward, and oppressive symbol through the fusion of liberal feminism and
Muslim immigrant integration discourses (Yurdakul, 2009).
The three-country cases show how headscarf debates that unfolded in the first decade
of this century exhibit important variation in how the Muslim headscarf is regulated as
well as meaningful differences in who participates in these debates. France was formally
the most restrictive country, even putting into question whether headscarf-wearing
women were capable of independent speech. In addition to state regulations of headscarf
bans, as Lépinard (2014) shows in her interview-based empirical work, French liberal
women’s organizations adopt a ‘gender first!’ approach, which ignores postcolonial
difference. In both the Netherlands and Germany, such arguments were also part of
regulatory discourses but they were countered by alternative articulations of the right to
wear a headscarf. However, when we turn to the arguments of feminist interlocutors, we
saw striking overlaps. Across the three cases, the headscarf was mostly portrayed as a
powerful symbol of women’s subordination in disregard of postcolonial difference
reflected in interpreting the meaning and practice of headscarf-wearing among these
countries highly diverse populations.
Successful liberal feminist claims for formal regulation reflect the inroads feminists
working within the context of the state have made. Resulting headscarf regulations
manage postcolonial difference through demands that Muslim communities adhere to
gender relations that signal ‘women’s liberation’ and echo colonial desires regarding
unveiling women. By analyzing our data for the ways in which liberal feminists activate
colonial tropes about saving brown or Muslim women from their men (Delphy, 2015;
Spivak, 1988), we show that liberal feminism’s engagements with the headscarf treat
classrooms and courts as postcolonial spaces that need to be regulated in order to erase
the threat associated with postcolonial difference. At the same time, both Muslim and
non-Muslim women’s decolonial projects generate alternative discourses in which
headscarves might signify women’s agency and political, social, and economic
participation; however, they had more limited impact on shaping public discourses and
almost no impact on regulation.
In the contemporary context, where the difference is both materially related to
postcolonial migrant streams and interpreted in the context of colonial histories,
16 Social Compass 00(0)
liberal feminist discourses overlooked a particular double-talk. If headscarf-wearing
women were passive victims of families, religion, and rigid gender norms, they can be
freed by the regulations of European governments. Simultaneously, our ongoing
research shows that decolonial projects of headscarf-wearing women are increasingly
presented as active threats to European nations, insistently marking their Islamic
presence in the European public sphere. In this context, feminist ideas of liberation
become harnessed to political projects that risk denying racialized women’s agency
and political efficacy through attempts to erase postcolonial difference (Korteweg,
2017; Orloff and Shiff, 2016).
Ultimately, liberal feminism has largely failed headscarf-wearing women in its too-
narrow understanding of liberation and in its inability to see gender relations as power
relations deeply imbricated by multiple differences. Our findings show that the liberatory
practices upheld by liberal feminists are exclusionary practices in the postcolonial
context (Sheth, 2006).
Further research is needed on the decolonial potential of headscarf-wearing Muslim
women not as victims but as agents of gender equality in the postcolonial context (e.g.
see Van Es, 2016; Zimmerman, 2015). This has the potential to show us why the headscarf
continues to be a site of regulation, particularly in light of ongoing attempts to criminalize
Muslim women’s bodies as they engage in religious expression.
Acknowledgements
We have presented various versions of this article in various international conferences and lectures
as sole or co-presenters. We thank Anna Amelina, Myra Marx Ferree, Pascale Fournier, Helma
Lutz, Raka Ray, Hae Yeon Choo and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback
during the presentations and writing process of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This research was partially supported by a Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant and Humboldt University of
Berlin’s Gender Equality Funds.
ORCID iD
Gökçe Yurdakul https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2604-0743
Notes
1. Note that we focus on the headscarf or hijab, which leaves the face uncovered and do not
discuss niqab or burqa.
2. In 2003, Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (NPNS) conducted a series of marches across France to raise
awareness regarding the issues faced by immigrant women and girls in the banlieues, and the
French prime minister at the time, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, recognized them in the Bastille Day
celebrations of 2003.
3. All newspaper articles cited are available from the authors upon request.
4. Originally published as a position paper on 17 December 2003. Available at: http://www.lale-
akguen.de.
Korteweg and Yurdakul: Debating Headscarves in France, the Netherlands, and Germany 17
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Author biographies
Anna C KORTEWEG is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her
research has focused on the ways in which the perceived problems of immigrant integration are
20 Social Compass 00(0)
constructed in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity, and national origin. From this critical
vantage point, she has published extensively on debates surrounding the wearing of the headscarf,
so-called ‘honor-based’ violence, and Sharia law. Her current projects look at the return of women
who joined the Islamic State to their European home countries, the construction of LGBTQ/gender
rights in refugee politics, and the citizenship implications of refugee sponsorship in Canada.
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 7 25 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON
M5S2J4, Canada.
Email: anna.korteweg@utoronto.ca
Gökçe YURDAKUL is Georg-Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Humboldt
University of Berlin and Chair of research cluster in the Berlin Institute of Migration and Integration
Research. She has published five books and numerous articles on immigrant integration,
citizenship, and Islam in Europe, and Muslim women’s issues in Western Europe and North
America. Her most recent book is The headscarf debates: Conflict in national narratives (2014,
Stanford University Press, with Anna Korteweg). Her current project is on Turkish immigrants and
their Germany-born children’s responses to racism and discrimination in Berlin schools.
Address: Berlin Institute of Migration and Integration Research, Institute of Social Sciences,
Humboldt University of Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany.
Email: gokce.yurdakul@sowi.hu-berlin.de
... Publications in English have thus dominated academic writings on these issues even as concerns the French setting. The case of women wearing a hijab and its politicization have attracted significant attention, spanning different topics and methodologies, from critical discourse analysis (see for instance the transnational analysis of newspapers as well as policy and legal documents conducted by Korteweg & Yurdakul, 2021), to lived experiences (Hancock & Mobillion, 2019;Najib & Hopkins, 2019;Laxer et al., 2023), to the study of 'ordinary perpetrators' (Faury, 2023). Most of these studies converge in demonstrating a heightened level of oppression while documenting women's coping strategies and agency. ...
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... The third case took place in the same class as the previous one, and addresses the question of whether or not teachers at public schools should be allowed to wear a headscarf, an issue that has been contentious for quite some time (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2021). It touches on the question of religious and cultural diversity, multiculturalism, social cohesion, and parallel value systems, and how best to approach all these topics. ...
... Therefore, the results could indicate that parents are more comfortable asking about headscarves than skin color, and thus avoid asking about skin color when possible. This would reflect societal patterns in the Netherlands where discussions of headscarves as compared to skin color are much more public (Korteweg & Yurdakul, 2020), even though headscarves are highly racialized (Al-Saji, 2010) and thus talking about headscarves can act as a proxy for discussing race. At the same time, these results could be interpreted as suggesting that parents in the Netherlands are less comfortable or well-equipped to mention skin color differences between people of color versus between people of color and White people. ...
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Objectives: Parents can set examples of social norms about ethnic diversity and interethnic relations in interaction with their children. The present study examined whether and how parents set norms of color-evasiveness and White normativity when playing a social categorization game with their children. Method: In a sample of 141 White Dutch, 73 Turkish-Dutch, and 56 Black Dutch mothers of a 6- to 10-year-old child, behaviors reflecting color-evasiveness (avoiding skin color questions, asking about skin color late in the game, taking relatively long to formulate skin color questions) and White normativity (bias in ethnic–racial focus used) were observed. Two subsamples (mothers approximately 2 years later and fathers) were used to try to replicate results. Results: Color-evasiveness was most frequent among White Dutch mothers and during the version of the game including pictures of South West Asian/North African and Black adults, but did not depend on the ethnic–racial background of the researchers. All mothers who asked about skin color displayed patterns of ethnic–racial focus that reflect White normativity, by focusing on dark rather than light skin colors. This bias was irrespective of their own ethnic–racial background, ethnic–racial background of the researchers, and the version of the game. Patterns of color-evasiveness and White normativity were largely replicated in both subsamples. Conclusions: These results suggest that children might already learn societal norms that conflict with anti-racism in very basic parent–child interactions situations. Future research is needed to investigate how to foster more inclusive social norms such as color consciousness in the next generation and their parents.
... In doing so, she not only situates the Turkish heritage mothers as outside of German culture, she also reinforces a problematic notion of Muslim women as helpless and the headscarf as a symbol of oppression (e.g. Korteweg & Yurdakul, 2021). ...
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Full-text available
Parents help youth make sense of current society, including in relation to racial-ethnic inequity. The goal of the current study was to assess white racial-ethnic socialization (RES) in Germany. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 white German parents of elementary school children in an eastern German city and analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis. The most prominent theme was silence about race. One form this took was socialization into white normativity, with parents situating their families as “normal.” Another cross-cutting theme was insecurity about language and age-appropriate ways to address race-ethnicity. Many parents engaged in diversity socialization, though this generally remained abstract. Some parents actively engaged in stereotyping and Othering. These findings underscore the need for more attention to RES in Germany, including how context shapes the interplay of national, racial, and ethnic identities within global systems of power and oppression.
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