The link between Islamophobia and hostility to face covering is a long-standing one. Two years ago, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared veiled Muslim women to “letterboxes,” and back in 2011 French President Nicolas Sarkozy introduced the controversial “burka ban,” prohibiting Muslim women from wearing full-face veils in public. In France, government orders to wear masks in response to COVID-19 have struck many as somewhat ironic, if not downright discriminatory. As James McAuley of the Washington Post remarked: “if an observant Muslim woman wanted to get on the Paris Metro, she would be required to remove her burqa and replace it with a mask.”
If the intention of Sarkozy’s law, entitled La République se vit à visage découvert (“The Republic is lived with an open face”), was clearly discriminatory, it wrapped itself in a more noble justification, stretching back to the Enlightenment, for appearing unmasked in the public sphere. Rejecting the courtly politics of the Ancien Régime, marked by the aristocratic bals masqués, philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that governance in a republic should be perfectly transparent: those who participate in the public sphere should be able to see and be seen. Only then could a truly democratic politics come into being.
Rousseau’s idea was that democratic citizens would engage with one another publicly, which would compel them to take responsibility for their views. But two recent developments have challenged that democratic space.
The first is technological innovations such as facial recognition, which states can and do use to monitor and control their populations. This is why pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, for example, didn’t wait until the pandemic to cover their faces.
Second, the mask mandates that many Western countries have introduced in response to COVID-19 make the kind of transparency Rousseau had in mind difficult to achieve. When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in June, participants who, as good democrats, normally would have demonstrated “open faced” often, as good citizens, covered their faces.
This lack of transparency can be amusing or frustrating for demonstrators who find themselves unable to recognize friends and comrades. But when it happens on the other side – when security forces remove or obscure their official insignia, effectively giving them impunity for violence against peaceful protesters – the threat to democratic public space is fundamental. These concerns have since come to a head with Trump’s deployment of federal paramilitaries to repress nightly protests in Portland, Oregon, and his willingness to do the same in other cities.
At the end of the day, the pandemic and the protests should remind us of a simple truth: a mask is always just a mask. What matters for democracy is not whether people cover their faces in public, but which people do so, and why.
Hugo Drochon, assistant professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham, is the author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics.