pubTalk

The following blog post was written by Dr. Katherine Fennelly, Professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

You may have heard about a recent incident in which a St. Paul police officer dressed up as a Somali woman. Such ridicule can be very hurtful, as we learned last year when U of M graduate students, Alli Shurilla, Ramon Hough and Deka Ahmed helped me interview a number of African and Asian men and women to ask if they had been treated differently because of their clothing. The answers were instructive. Somali, Hmong and Indian Sikh adults in the Twin Cities described cases in which they faced discrimination or ridicule because they were wearing traditional ethnic dress. Some of their reactions were captured in a video called The Clothes I Wear, edited by Ramon Hough. Two of the women in the video told us that people incorrectly assume that they are "oppressed" because they wear traditional clothing. A Sikh man described repeated incidents of discrimination as he traveled through airports wearing a turban.

For many individuals, wearing modest clothing or covering their hair demonstrates religious modesty or humility -similar to the reasons for traditional Catholic nuns' habits, or the custom for some Christian or Jewish men and women of covering their heads in a church or synagogue, or at a funeral. The next time you see someone wearing ethnic clothing, consider whether your reaction to them is colored by preconceived stereotypes.