On Burkini Bans and Institutional Racism

The photos capture a woman lying serenely on a pebble beach in a full-body swimsuit. She is unaware of the four men as they approach. They wear guns and bulletproof vests, and demand the woman remove her shirt. They watch as she complies.

French police approach woman in burkini on beach

(Image source: The Guardian)

This scene was reported in recent weeks by news outlets across the globe. More than twenty coastal towns and cities in France imposed bans on the burkini, the full body swimsuit favored by religious Muslim women. Like many, I have been transfixed by the images of brazen discrimination and shaming. Although the woman in the photographs, identified only as Siam, was not wearing a burkini, her body was targeted by a racist institution, the State.

French politicians have falsely linked the burkini with religious fundamentalism. They have employed both blatant and subtly racist language to express indignation at the sight of a non-white, non-Western female body in a public space designated as “white.”

Olivier Majewicz, the Socialist mayor of Oye-Plage, a town on the northern coast of France, described a Muslim woman on the beach as appearing “a bit wild, close to nature.” Her attire, he said, was not “what one normally expects from a beachgoer…we are in a small town and the beach is a small, family friendly place.” France’s Socialist Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, utilized more direct language, stating that the burkini enslaved women and that the “nation must defend itself.” Similarly blunt, Thierry Migoule, an official with the municipal services in Cannes, said the burkini “conveys an allegiance to the terrorist movements that are waging war against us.”

These quotes reflect the pernicious limitations of the white gaze. When I look at the photos of Siam, I see a woman, a mother, being forced to undress before a crowd of strangers. I can hear her children, terrified, crying nearby. Siam’s encounter was a scene of trauma, and as Henri Rossi, the vice president of the League of Human Rights in Cannes, said “this trauma has not been cured; the convalescence has not yet begun.”

Some sixty years ago, Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, explored the relationships between the white gaze and the black body, specifically in France and its colonies. In the age of the burkini ban, Fanon’s observations ring poignant and true. He writes: “…we were given the occasion to confront the white gaze. An unusual weight descended on us. The real world robbed us of our share. In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating. It’s an image in the third person. All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” Fanon’s words could serve as the soundtrack to Siam’s encounter with the police. She was robbed of her share, her body negated and deemed a public threat by the white gaze.

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks in France, politicians have capitalized on the politics of fear in order to renegotiate the boundaries of institutional racism as expressed in the public sphere. In Living with Racism, Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes quote Arthur Brittan and Mary Maynard (Sexism, Racism and Oppression) about the ever-changing “terms of oppression.” Brittan and Maynard write:

“the terms of oppression are not only dictated by history, culture, and the sexual and social division of labor. They are also profoundly shaped at the site of the oppression, and by the way in which oppressors and oppressed continuously have to renegotiate, reconstruct, and re-establish their relative positions in respect to benefits and power.”

As the burkini affords Muslim women the benefit to participate in different arenas of public space, the state recalibrates its boundaries to create new or revive previous sites of oppression. In the case of the burkini, the sites of oppression are both public beaches and women’s bodies – common sites of attempted domination, not only in France, but also the U.S.

Fanon, Feagin and Sikes all point to institutional racism as an engine that fuels white supremacy and its policies of discrimination. As Feagin and Sikes observe, these:

“recurring encounters with white racism can be viewed as a series of ‘life crises,’ often similar to other serious life crises, such as the death of a loved one, that disturb an individual’s life trajectory.”

The photos of Siam capture the unfolding of life crisis and illustrate the power of institutional racism to inflict both individual and collective traumas.


~ Julia Lipkins is a student in American Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. 

Research Brief: Collateral Damage to Health from Invasive Police Encounters in New York City

Overpolicing in the form of invasive police encounters like stop-and-frisk affects the health of residents in American neighborhood according to sociologists Abigail Sewell and Kevin A. Jefferson. This infographic illustrates the key findings in their research.



(Image credit: Melissa Brown)

In a recent Journal of Urban Health article, they use data from two datasets based on the health and policing experiences of New Yorkers. They argue that numerous public health risks are associated with overpolicing including:

  • Poor/fair health
  • Overweight/Obesity
  • Diabetes
  • High blood pressure
  • Asthma episodes

In their analysis of the health and policing in New York, the researchers sought to answer the following questions:

  1. What are the health effects of the concentration of police stops within certain neighborhoods?
  2. Is there a relationship between reports of poor health and invasive Terry stops?
  3. If health effects of invasive police encounters in neighborhoods exist, do they vary by race and ethnicity?

The researchers found that neighborhoods with high frisk rates increased the odds of having health issue related to all the risks mentioned above. They also found that police stops generally worsen the health of Blacks and Latinos, but does not have as significant effect for Whites and Asians. In light of these results, the researchers argue that police actions potentially affect communities by exposing residents to invasive practices that generate illness. You can download a pdf of the graphic here.


~ Melissa Brown is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Maryland and social media manager for the Critical Race Initiative