This Muslim American Life by Moustafa Bayoumi

Author:Moustafa Bayoumi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO002000 Literary Collections / American / General
Publisher: NYU Press

The Browning of America

At the very fringes, an explicit “white power” movement does in fact exist in the United States, and according the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks domestic hate groups, “white power” and other right-wing extremist groups have grown “explosively” in recent years. (I discuss this more in Chapter 10.) And yet the “white power” movement is only the most extreme example of a narrative of discomfort between an older version of America and a new multicultural, multiethnic, and multifaith America, but the fretful sentiment is commonly found among large swaths of the population. The best evidence for this, particularly when considering attitudes toward Muslim Americans, is found in a 2011 study coproduced by the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute titled What It Means to Be an American: Attitudes in an Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years after 9/11.16 The researchers polled 2,450 adult Americans on a variety of pressing political questions surrounding immigration and identity, and the results are intriguing, particularly because the study took age, education, and political leaning into account. While it was not solely concerned with American attitudes toward Muslims, the study did consider many questions about American attitudes to Islam; the results clearly show that suspicion of Muslims divides along political and generational lines. (The study did not quantify responses by race.)

According to the poll, older Republicans specifically, not the public generally, are the most predisposed to be suspicious. Fewer than half of the Republicans surveyed held favorable views of Muslims, compared with about two-thirds of the Democrats, and younger Americans (eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds) had twice as much social interaction with Muslims compared to their seniors. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans say that the values of Islam are at odds with American values and that trust in Fox News correlates highly with negative attitudes about Islam. Significantly, the number of Republicans that perceives a conflict between American values and Islam (63 percent) is in the same ballpark as of Republicans who also see immigrants generally as threatening American customs and values (55 percent). Through its many questions, the poll confirms the view that those holding the most ardent anti-Muslim attitudes come mainly from a very specific, generally older, and highly conservative segment of the population, precisely the ones who would feel most threatened by the browning of America.

It may not seem so, but this is ultimately good news. For one thing, the current generation of younger Americans, the most religiously and ethnically diverse in the nation’s history, tends to be less opposed to Muslim Americans than their senior counterparts, though 23 percent of younger Americans still bewilderingly believe that American Muslims are trying to establish sharia law in the land. While it’s always possible that people’s opinions change as they age, the overall trends in the survey strongly suggest a society of more rather than less inclusion.

More important in the short run is the recognition that we don’t have to assume a “clash of civilizations” confrontation every time a conflict with Muslim Americans arises.

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