January 19, 2015--Headscarves

At his joint news conference Friday with British Prime Minister David Cameron, with unusual public candor, Barack Obama said--

Our Muslim populations, they feel themselves to be Americans. There is, you know, this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition that is probably our greatest strength. There are parts of Europe in which that's not the case, and that's probably the greatest danger that Europe faces.

He could have added, getting himself into more trouble for truth-telling, that if we think about just France, which includes Europe's largest Muslim population, French ideology also contributes to the danger.

They live with the assertion and the fiction that theirs is a non-racial society. That Muslims, for example, who migrate to France from one of their former colonies are French citizens (no need to live in the shadows) with a full set of rights that derive from a belief system that claims that these rights are universal and are a natural benefit of the very fact of being human.

Thus, in an act of avoidance and social absurdity, France does not even gather statistics about how its various ethic minorities are faring--income numbers, educational-attainment levels, family size, religious affiliations, and so forth. All citizens are equally French and there is no need to make any divisive distinctions.

They do not even point out that though Muslims make up a full 10 percent of France's population, in the 577-seat French Assembly only about 10 are Muslims. And this, hypocritically (since France is supposed to be a fully secular society and data about religious affiliation is not actively gathered), is only because by recent action these seats were specifically craved out to assure at least some "minority" representation since until a few years only one member was Islamic.

And most Muslims in France, though they have documented, legal status, do in fact live in a Gallic version of shadows--in banlieues, isolated and segregated Muslim suburbs that surround all French cities where lack of education, jobs, and hope are endemic.

To make matters worse, the French authorities, by clinging to these illusions, take aggressive action to forbid any public display of ethnic or especially religious affiliation. For years controversy has raged around the issue of women wearing full veils and girls wearing headscarves (hajibs) in schools and other state institutions--l'affaire du voile. They are banned and this contributes to the tension between the Muslim and more secular French communities.

Meanwhile in Florida where immigrants legal and undocumented are not always welcome (I am trying to be kind) headscarves are common.

The other day, we needed to do some banking for my mother and at Wells Fargo, about a mile from where she lives, many of the women on line or waiting to see bank officers were wearing headscarves and seemed comfortable in the mix of Anglos and others from various Caribbean islands.

Later the same day, at Foodtown in multiethnic Davie, many of the customers and half the cashiers were wearing hajibs and, as at the bank, seemed totally assimilated in the polyglot mix.

So I think Obama had it right--many in Europe could do much better and isn't it good that we are as welcoming a society as we are. Far from perfect, but on the world stage, impressive.