The United States of inclusivity

[Apollo]

The meaning of a symbol is determined by the people who use the symbol. Western liberals don't decide the meaning.

If the women who choose to wear the hijab don't agree that it's a symbol of patriarchy and punitive measures, then it isn't.

So, if the Nazis think that the swastika is simply a symbol of national pride and not one of oppression and genocide, that makes it so?

Boru

So if some whites think the N word or blackfacing or confederate flags are artifacts of harmless cultural heritage, does it make them so?

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Not sure what you mean. I already used an example vis a vis Linda Sarsour or using it as token representation of Muslim women.

When western liberals accept hijab as cultural practice without questioning what it symbolizes and how it is used to push patriarchy and even as gateway to punitive measures and violence across Muslim world, they pander.

The hijab obviously hasn't been accepted uncritically, and it's hardly unique as a product of patriarchy when it comes to clothes.

If someone's otherness is defined by (or signified by) their wearing a hijab to a given culture - then it would make sense to represent people in hijabs. That's exactly the kind of otherness that imagined and real contact has been shown to reduce. Turns out that seeing something strange, alot, makes it less strange or not strange.

As it so happens, pushback against the hijab is not at all an issue of being concerned over women's health, but an exercise in othering muslims using their headgear as we do (and as they do), as a signifier. In the end, it's not really strange - that's just an artifact of us wearing a different set of things over our heads - and it's not as if what we put on our heads and elsewhere is any less a product of a violent patriarchy.

Perhaps we could approach this from the opposite direction. What if we always wrote and made movies about battered women, in hijabs? Anytime you saw a hijab it meant that it was hiding bruises. That when we see a hijab we immediately think that there's a man offscene beating the poor girl. Or perhaps something less extreme, that anytime we see a hijab that must mean that an abusive patriarchal relationship is at play - if not instituted by the principal partners....imposed by their shared culture. That it's inconceivable that a loving man and a loving woman are in a loving relationship...in which she puts a cloth thing on her head. That it's always a horror story, and never a romance. Wouldn't this be a far better example of a bigotry of low expectations?

That’s precisely is the problem—letting others get off the hook because they are “others”.

Should we keep quite because blood diamond trade is just business practice of others? Why liberal enlightenment is exclusively applied to natives when it comes to human values affecting women, homosexuals, freedom of speech, right to assert oneself, etc etc and not to immigrants?

Are there no expectations from immigrants to adopt the cultural values of their new countries just the same there is expectations of accepting their foreign cultural practices?

Melting pot goes both ways. If we will selectively apply our principles by the consideration of national origin then in essence we are letting go of our egalitarian values of fairness and equality.

As a person of first generation US citizen with voting rights, I should be expected to judged by same cultural moral behavior as blacks, whites, and people of other ethnic/religious/national origin. You cannot bend the rules to give preferential treatment.

Ps. When I say rules I don’t mean law. I mean and objective view of a cultural practice and social dialogue that follows.