American Islamophobia

The scale of Islamophobia in America is startling. On Thursday New America and the American Muslim Institution (AMI) unveiled their study on perceptions of Muslim Americans among non-Muslims. The survey conducted roughly 1,000 interviews nation-wide and zoomed in on Washington DC and 3 other cities for additional insight. Only 56% of respondents saw Islam as compatible with American values, and one in three respondents would feel uncomfortable with seeing a Muslim woman wearing a veil, or with a mosque or Islamic center being opened in their neighborhood.

Panelists Robert McKenzie, Director and Senior Fellow at New America, and Shafiq Khan, a Board Member at AMI, were also surprised by the results from DC. It was their expectation based on their own experiences and conversations with many local Imams and community leaders that DC was a significantly more open and worldlier city than the United States as a whole. Instead, the results showed that on some questions DC exhibited more bigotry than the national average.

Partisan affiliation was the best predictor of anti-Muslim attitudes, with Republicans 30% more likely than the overall group to see Islam as incompatible with American values. This result dovetails with recent work
showing that American’s racial attitudes are increasingly organized along with the partisan divide.

The average respondent put Muslims at 17% of the America population, while the real makeup is somewhere closer to 1 percent. Disproportionate media coverage may be to blame, especially in the larger context of conspiracy theories, “culture wars,” and majority fears about marginalization. If so it would raise the question of how best to fight the caustic narrative around American Muslims without continuing to blow the issue out of proportion.

Unpleasant surprise was the major takeaway from the discussion. Islamophobia, despite expectations, is not relegated to some extremist fringe, but is now  widespread among the American populace.

Still, further investigation is in order. The interviews were intentionally conducted in October of this year, when Islamophobia would be heightened due to the midterm elections. But as of yet there is no second round of surveys to confirm or rebut that assumption. The survey made no distinction between American views of Muslim and other immigrants, or between recent immigrants and the long established African-American Muslim community.

After delivering evidence of the scale of the problem Khan and McKenzie seemed unsure of what is needed as a remedy. McKenzie  wanted to hand the report over to local journalists and politicians, hoping they would leap into action to address their communities and set the record straight. The report and its presentation raised more questions than it answered.