Christine Delphy: Is mainstream French feminism racist? I co-founded Nouvelles Questions Feministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir in 1977 and have long been involved with Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) but increasingly, it’s clear to me that French attitudes towards the hijab and Muslim women are not just incomprehensible, but reprehensible. The first openly anti-Muslim law was passed in 2004, banning schoolgirls from wearing a headscarf, based on the belief that “religious signs” are contrary to laïcité – political secularism. But the ideological campaign against Islam started more than 40 years ago. Journalist Thomas Deltombe established that, between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, not a week passed without one or the other of the two main French weeklies asking “Should we be afraid of Islam?” or “Is Islam incompatible with democracy?”. […] Now laïcité is used as an argument against Muslims, as this law has undergone a radical reinterpretation by politicians, journalists and lobbyists, and has been falsified. As Saïd Bouamama wrote in 2004, the French version of Islamophobia, trying to pass as political secularism, is just a way of making racism respectable. Even before the 2004 law meant scarf-wearing teenagers would be excluded from schools – thus violating their fundamental right to education – France’s established feminist groups did not accept scarf-wearing women in their meetings. […] This contempt is ironic: it is assumed these women wear a scarf as they are forced to do so by their menfolk, and that the solution to that undue influence is to expel them from school and send them back to the same oppressive families. If French feminists saw scarf-wearing Muslims as oppressed women, it should be a reason not to expel them from school or to curtail their movements, but to embrace them. […] White feminists should accept that these women want to develop their own feminism based on their own situation, and that this feminism will take their Islamic culture into account. Instead, my fellow feminists are colluding in widening one of the worst rifts within French society, when time is running out. More here.