Terrible Political Sin of Telling

¶ … Terrible Political Sin of Telling the Truth

In October 2006, British former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw did something that is politically highly problematic. He said something that a lot of other people had thought about saying but hadn't done so because they realized that it would be highly unpopular for them to voice what they also believed to be true. And because he said something that a lot of other people thought that someone -- as long as it wasn't them -- should say, he received a significant amount of criticism. Of course, many of those who criticized him no doubt did so because they were authentically convinced that they were right and he was wrong. But there were no doubt others who used their loud criticism of Straw as a cover for their own at-least ambivalent support of his statement.

So what was this statement that caused so much furore about? His own discomfort about meeting with Muslim women who wore full facial veils. In a newspaper story, Straw wrote that full-face veils were a "a visible statement of separation and difference" and that when he met with his constituents he felt more comfortable if they did not wear veils. He made it clear that he would never require a woman to remove her veil and that he always had a female co-worker with him in the office when a female constituent was present. Straw, who was also the former head of the House of Commons, said in an interview that followed the article that he felt that "wearing the full veil was bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult."

There were immediate protests against Straw's comments. People attacked him as a bigot. The first female Muslim peer in the House of Lords, Pola Uddin, said that Straw (and by extension the British government) had "attacked those who would be our greatest allies in meeting the current challenges of terrorism and radicalisation ...[and had created] a feeling of vulnerability and demonisation of Muslim women" (Edgar, 2006).

Others criticized him not because they thought he was wrong but simply because they would have preferred -- or at least they said -- that the matter had simply not been brought up. And some, like Labour Member of Parliament Harriet Harman said that she too wished to see the veil abolished, not because it made her feel uncomfortable but because she sees the veil as a symbol -- and tool -- of oppression: "The veil is an obstacle to women's participation, on equal terms, in society" (Bunting, 2006).

The initial responses tended to be fiery, a sure sign that what Straw had said -- whether he intended it or not -- had touched on an issue that was deeply important to many people. The practice of veiling itself was not irrelevant to the debate, but nor was it central. What was central to the debate -- or the mutual shouting match, since debates tend to be more dignified and less personally venomous -- was the question of how tolerant a multicultural democracy has to be. It is a shame -- for Britain as well as for the other multicultural democracies -- that there was so much heat and so little light to the debate.

How it could have been any other way is hard to imagine, for the fundamental issues involved are so important. When people fight with either swords or IEDs or Exocets or words about the things that are most important to them, there will always be heat. Those who joined the debate were talking about democracy and religion and freedom and gender and family and who has the power to tell each one of us who it is that we are. And who it is that gets to tell us where we can call home.

(Multi)Culture

The debate that Straw instigated, or at least initiated, is a debate about culture. It is also a debate about politics and economics -- although a cultural anthropologist would tell you that everything is culture, including politics and economics. Culture is difficult to define because it surrounds us: It is like the air. We cannot live without it, and we would almost immediately notice its absence. But we cannot see it. Cannot grab hold of it. Still it is impossible to talk about the issues surrounding the wearing of the veil and why it is central to political debates in Europe without coming up with a working definition of culture.

Culture is habit. it's the habitual way we do and think and feel. It is the clothes that we wear and the food that we eat, our language, our religion, the shape of our houses and our furniture, the kinds of animals that we keep as pets, the size of our families. How we define femininity and masculinity. It tells us who we can -- and cannot -- marry. It defines what is beautiful and terrible. Culture tunes music and colors painting and weaves fabric and writes poetry. And nearly everything else. It is both so amorphous and so important that it is easy to become sloppy when we talk about it (Calhoun, 1994).

We tend to talk about "American culture" or "British culture" or "Muslim culture." And in some measure such terms make sense. There are things that connect Americans to each other that separate them from other people. Americans share a flag, a Constitution, a form of governance. Americans share certain national myths -- the Pilgrims and their turkeys (partly true); George Washington and his wooden teeth (not at all true); the courage of Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King (entirely true). In some measure, Americans share a language, although this is less true at certain times in history than at others. There are some basic beliefs that Americans tend to share, a belief that effort is more important than birth, for example.

But, as should be quite clear, there are numerous intra-cultural differences among Americans. So many differences that it is impossible not to wonder whether it even makes sense to think about a singular American culture at all. The same is true in Britain as well, and what Jack Straw did when he wrote his article and then responded to the issue in interviews that he did was to remind people how thin the papering over of cultural differences in Britain are. The idea of Britain as a single nation -- in a cultural as opposed to a political sense -- is like the idea of a broken egg that has been pieced together with fragments of tissue paper. The cracks still show.

Tolerance Is Not Enough

Citizens of modern democracies, if they are liberal, tend to think of themselves as supportive of multicultural societies. Multiculturalism is fundamentally a liberal concept, a model that celebrates ethnic and cultural differences and that asks each individual and each group to be aware of and celebrate the attributes and contributions of other groups. This may seem to be a good and basically harmless ideology. Who can disagree with the idea that everyone has something to contribute to society? Who could (reasonably) deny that people who are not like us are just as important as we are? (Phillips, 2007).

The response to this -- and this bears directly on the debate that Straw engendered -- is that there is nothing wrong with an appreciation of other people and groups, but that multiculturalism simply does not go far enough. Multiculturalism as a model of society, and as a prescription for action, does not recognize the differences in power that exist between different groups and by failing to recognizing them invalidates the experiences of those with less power in society.

It is easy for people who are even moderately liberal to develop an appreciation for food from other cultures, to find beauty in a different style of architecture, to enjoy listening to a new form of music, to take a class to learn a little of a foreign language. None of these things -- which are perfectly good things to do -- require one to try to understand the experiences of another person in any deep way. And they certainly do not require one to understand the way in which privilege works and how much less power other people may have.

Some of those who spoke against Straw's words talked about this. It was offensive, they said, that Straw did not acknowledge how much more power he had than a Muslim woman. When he said that he did not want women to veil in his presence, that statement carried the weight of his race and his gender and his class. He had more power and so he was obligated to use his power carefully. People with power have to be responsible, and multiculturalism is too weak a model to force people with power to be truly responsible. Good people do not use their power to make those with less power frightened or stupid or wrong. Good people do not use their power as belonging to the dominant group in society to make those who are minorities -- because of their race or their gender, their religion or their ethnicity -- feel lesser.

Simple, right? Multiculturalism preaches tolerance, and this is a very good first step. But critical multiculturalism teaches tolerance plus the need to be honest with ourselves and others about who in any relationship or interaction has power. Simple, right? Well, not really. One of the striking things about the responses to Straw was that while many of his critics chastised (or excoriated) him for siding with Western values against the values of his Muslim constituents, some of those who supported him praised him for siding with Western values (such as freedom and self-autonomy) against patriarchy and sexism. When he said that veils were not a good thing for a society that includes Muslim women, was he perhaps speaking in defense of those women?

Not So Simple: Who Speaks for Whom?

As noted above, as Bennett (1998) writes, one of the key mistakes that can be made when examining culture is to assume that all of the members of that culture agree with each other. This is certainly never the case. Cultures become defined by those who have the most power. And the cultural rules that are established are therefore almost always those that benefit those with the most power. This makes perfect sense: Anyone who knows anything about human nature will find this to be exactly what one would expect. But while it is perfectly predictable, it is also potentially highly problematic in any number of situations. And the relationship between Muslim immigrants and others in their host countries is precisely the kind of situation where differences in power among subgroups within a culture are likely to cause fractures (Parekh, 2000).

Straw was truthful when he said that Muslim women who wear veils create a sense of separation between themselves and other Britons. (Other groups also set themselves apart -- Jewish men by the hair, for example.) and it was clear by his remarks that he disapproved of such separation not simply because he personally felt uncomfortable but because he believes that in a modern democracy such as Great Britain women should be treated as equals. And he believed that veiled women are not treated as equals by definition.

That was the truth in his statement that caused so much of the sound and fury: Women veil because they are oppressed. His critics immediately argued that this was bigotry, a refutation of all that good citizens in a Western democracy should believe in. If Muslim women want to veil themselves, then it's no one else's business and anyone who even questions it is a racist. And an Islamophobe. Simple, right? Except that, of course, it's not.