Oppression is only when brown men tell you how to dress; when white men do it, it’s called liberation
I was just reading feminist psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller who wrote that "women, by their very existence, confront and challenge men because they have been made the embodiment of the dominant culture's unsolved problems" (Baker Miller 1988: 58). Baker Miller was talking about emotions and the issues Western culture had with them, but this statement is now true for women wearing the hijab (or the burkini) in France and beyond. Those women are reified and denied individuality in a very gendered racist manner. French authorities fight the presence of veiled women in public because it challenges the implicit racial segregation of space (no, veiled women do not exist in the sole parallel world of the banlieue, they inhabit the country as a whole, beaches, school trips, and all), and forces white people to face the fact that their (post)colonial domination over the rest of the world (home and abroad) is fading. The post's title comes from this article .