Many white feminists thought it was their mission to help emancipate Muslim women and girls from a particular type of patriarchy tied to Islam. To me, the preoccupation with the hijab seemed to be a condescending way of singling out a mainly non-white group of females as if they were not affected by the same forms of patriarchy as other women.
I took the view that we had to listen to what women and girls wanted for themselves before explaining their experience through the lens of cultural domination. Secularism imposed neutrality on the French state and on public institutions, but did not require personal neutrality from citizens.
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