Burqas, Sarkozy and French tolerance

President Nicolas Sarkozy describes women in burkas as symbols of the oppression of women.

Oppression by whom?

The implication is women wearing burkas in France are doing so unwillingly, or at least because they have been intimidated into this behaviour by men who have power over them, much as teen age girls in America are told by their parents, "You are not leaving this house wearing that."

At issue here are perceptions, symbolism and unknown "facts."

What is happening in the mind under each of those black burkas is something we cannot know, especially here in America where we simply do not have enough personal experience with the women wearing black from head to fingertip to toe.

How many women who wear these outfits have you spoken with? And if you have spoken with them, were there men or chaperones present? And in what language did you converse? If you spoke in English, there was a selection bias ipso facto, race isp loquitor etc because any woman in a burka who speaks English has been educated in a way which makes her exceptional.

I have had the opportunity to interview women in burkas with women not wearing burkas as translators in my office outside Washington, DC when I practiced medicine there, and while we stuck mostly to symptoms and the medical business at hand, I did occasionally get a glimpse of the woman beneath the veil, so to speak, my view carefully  supervised, of course, but without getting into the details of the circumstances, I have to say I did not get the feeling the burka had been forced upon the women I was facing. It was more a case of these women having been socialized into the burka, just as our children are socialized to absorb on some unconscious level that public nudity, public revelation of genital areas, buttocks, bare breasts (in women) is embarrassing.

I loved that movie, The Gods Must Be Angry, because it alllowed you to see people through another set of eyes:  The Bantu saw blonde hair on women as looking like cobwebs and he felt sorry for the blonde woman he encountered because she looked so unattractive.  In the instance of burkas, we may be looking at the veiled women with our own cultural lenses.


President Sarkozy is likely expressing his own reaction to women in burkas: They look pretty unattractive and they must be sad inside.

It reminds me of that cartoon everyone in my generation remembers where the tiny people or elves or whatever they were rode butterflies to drop milk on the tiny people in black who sang, "We're happy when we're sad."  And once the black clad people were hit with the exploding bottles with the white liquid, they turned white themselves and they became happy.

Personally, I don't see burkas as symbols of oppression, but as expressions of choice, values and yes even religion. 

That lady in black hasn't hurt me. If we really believe in a society which tolerates differences, we ought to let people wear what they want to wear.

I remember a Finnish doctor who was leaving his job at Yale, and none of us could understand why he would want to give up that plum. We were at a backyard cookout and he pointed to a dozen children, frolicking in the backyard, running around, laughing. He said, "Look at that group of kids. Can you tell which are mine?"
None of us could.  He said, "That's why I'm going home. My kids have forgotten they're Finnish. You can't even pick them out from all their American friends. But we are Finnish and I don't want them to forget what that means."