Echo Chambers : The Politics of Diversity

Echo Chambers:The Politics of Diversity Faith, Power, & Violence (Sociology 159)

14.5

14.6

Religious Minorities • Anti-Semitism in America has declined continuously since WWII • As has anti-Catholic bias • Three groups notable for unpopularity: Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists. Why? • Minority status? • But Jews are a small minority, and the most popular religious group nation wide • Negative images? • Polygamous cultists, jihadist fanatics • But there is no corresponding negative image for Buddhists • Othered? (506-507)

Table 14.1

Intergroup Attitudes • Almost everyone likes mainstream Protestants and Jews • Almost everyone likes Catholics, more than Catholics like everyone else. • Evangelicals like almost everyone else more than they are liked in return. • Catholics and Evangelicals rate each other warmly (despite past animosities). • Mormons like everyone else, while almost everyone else dislikes Mormons. • Except Jews, who give them a net positive rating. Sympathy for minority religion? • Muslims & Buddhists disliked more than almost any other group. • But Jews are warm to Buddhists and cool toward Muslims. • Too few Muslims or Buddhists in sample (though reflective of national population) to say anything about their feeling about other faiths (509)

Disha, et al. • In 2001, 1600% increase in hate crimes reported against Muslims & Arabs compared to 2000 • 2000: 28, 2001: 117. In 2005, rate still 5 times higher than 2000 • Where are these crimes most prominent? • What affects the rate of hate crimes? • We see three notable ways in which minority group size is likely to influence hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims. • First, group size may simply indicate opportunity. At a general level, places with higher proportions of minorities may have more intergroup crime simply because there are more targets available. • More diversity  More conflict? (23)

Second approach “emphasizes the real or perceived threats posed by a minority group. • Blalock (1967), for instance, asserted that dominant groups in society would seek to maintain their powerful positions and would resort to discrimination and perhaps even violence to obviate threats from minority groups.” • Growing minorities target because they pose economic and/or political threat to majority power? (24)

Third, “a power-differential perspective would predict precisely the opposite of that posited by traditional group threat theory. • This line of theorizing suggests that majority group members are emboldened to act on their prejudices when they anticipate little or no reprisal from local law enforcement and a low likelihood of retribution from the minority group.” • Small minorities vulnerable in face of majority solidarity, unlikely to retaliate against majority for same reason • Safety in number, smallest minorities targeted most often? • Vs. second perspective (24)

Economic Conditions • “Christopher Lyons’s (2007) research on racially motivated crimes in Chicago communities found that anti-black hate crimes are more common in affluent white communities which ‘appear . . . Organized in favor of anti-black crimes’ (p. 847). • These wealthy and ostensibly socially organized communities are likely to have higher levels of trust, cohesion, and informal means of social control among community members. In such communities, ‘outsiders’ may be at higher risk of attack. • In short, there are reasons to suspect that hate crimes against Arabs/Muslims may be higher in affluent areas, although the causal mechanisms may have more to do with confounding factors such as social cohesion and informal control than absolute wealth (Lyons 2007).” (25)

Political Context & Triggering Events • “We consider the events of September 11th to be an historical event that transformed Arabs and Muslims into convenient targets for acts of “vicarious retribution,” defined as an act that “occurs when a member of a group commits an act of aggression toward members of an outgroup for an assault or provocation that had no personal consequences for him or her, but did harm a fellow ingroup member” (Lickel et al. 2006:372). • This implies that retaliatory actions by dominant group members are amplified in response to a (construed) threatening event.” • “Before 9/11, and despite experiences of discrimination (Akram and Johnson 2002), their plight was overshadowed by the concerns of other minority groups. After 9/11, Arabs and Muslims were largely depicted as a unified, coherent, and threatening group consisting of “foreigners,” “extremists,” and “terrorists” (Gerstenfeld 2004; Merskin 2004; Volpp 2002).” • Heightened salience of ingroup/outgroup distinction

Number of anti-Muslim/Arab hate crimes spikes post-9/11, but why more in some places than in others? • No association between percent Arab and anti-Arab/ Muslim hate crimes prior to 9/11, which lends little support for any of the theories discussed above that emphasize demographic influences. • Higher crime rate  bigger increase in hate crimes • 9/11 anti-Arab/Muslim hate crimes are more prevalent where the white population is proportionately larger • anti-Arab/Muslim hate crimes after 9/11 are more frequent in counties with larger proportions of individuals with Arab ancestry (35)

“Before 9/11, the chief determinants were overall population size, age structure, and wealth. Yet, it appears that 9/11 served as a catalyst for hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims (Figures 2 and 3), and in the wake of 9/11 it seems that religious, ethnic, and racial demographics help us explain with considerably less error where such hate crimes occurred. • After 9/11, places with higher proportionate numbers of Arabs and Muslims experienced more hate crimes of this nature.” (35)

Post-9/11, most ethnic & racial hate crimes drop, but ant-Arab/Muslim spikes • “This finding is consistent with reports from the FBI and from Arab advocacy organizations suggesting that 9/11 created a climate in which many Americans felt united against a “new enemy” and in which acts of hatred against Arabs and Muslims became “normalized” behaviors.” • “Historical events can serve as triggers that shape and enable the social construction of binary oppositions, such as “American citizen” versus “foreign alien”, increase levels of interethnic hostility and prejudice, and fuel intergroup violence through acts of vicarious retribution.” • “The timing of hate crime offending may change, but its place remains rather constant. This implies that the conditions for anti-Arab/Muslim hate crimes did not simply culminate immediately after September 11th. Rather, the conditions have been in place, probably as early as Arabs and Muslims began migrating to the United States, and hence some counties were ripe for vengeance in the aftermath of the 9/11 events.”

“We find little support for the traditional group threat account of prejudice and intergroup violence. • Once the Arab or Muslim populations were taken into account as offsets, the results indicated that Arabs and Muslims were at higher risk of victimization after 9/11 in counties where their proportions were extremely small, and Table 5 indicated that this was particularly the case when the majority group (whites) represented a very large proportion of the population. • In such contexts, the small minority group is visible, has little protection, and is thus highly vulnerable. We see this finding as aligning with a power-differential hypothesis.” • “Measured either as a count or as a rate, most of our models indicate that anti- Arab/Muslim hate crimes happen with more regularity in affluent counties. We suspect that hate crimes (in our case, anti-Arab/Muslim hate crimes) occur more frequently in affluent counties because they entail more informal social control and respond more forcefully to threatening outsiders.” (40-41)

Hollander • Obama a Muslim? • H1: Exposure to mainstream news media will moderate the perception that Obama was Muslim. • H2: Republicans or ideological conservatives will be more likely than Democrats or liberals to perceive Obama as Muslim and to maintain that misperception over time. • H3: Christian conservatives will be more likely to maintain or shift to a perception that Obama was Muslim than those who do not share those religious beliefs. • RQ1: Does exposure to mainstream news media moderate the perception of Obama as Muslim for specific socio-political groups? • Out of 2409 respondents, in Sept. 2008, 20.2% (486) say yes • November, 19.7% (474) say yes

“Those most likely to identify Obama as a Muslim tended to be younger, of lower income, White, less interested in politics, more conservative, less likely to talk about politics with friends, less likely to have voted, and scored lower on a basic test of political knowledge. Of importance here, respondents who self-reported as believing in a literal interpretation of the Bible were more likely than those who did not to also identify Obama as Muslim. • Blacks were significantly less likely to identify Obama as Muslim. Respondent factors demonstrating no relationship to Obama’s religious identification were sex, living in the South, or party identification. (60) • Same group “more likely to be among those who shifted from a perception of Obama as Christian in September but to Muslim in November, as compared to respondents who maintained he was Christian in both survey waves.” (62)

News media exposure was not a significant factor and removing political interest, which often “steals” variance from media items, did not improve the predictive power of media exposure. • Thus the results fail to support Hypothesis 1, which predicted the news media would moderate the “Obama is a Muslim” effect, and only partially supported Hypothesis 2 on the role of political ideology but not partisanship. • Hypothesis 3, which predicted conservative Christians would be more likely to maintain the Obama misperception over time, was also supported.” (62-63)

“Among the least educated, exposure to news media led to a shift in perception toward Obama as Muslim. To understand this contrary finding, I analyzed the models again with individual media items rather than the full index. • Only exposure to radio news neared the traditional level of statistical significance and looked similar to the overall media index result. Given the broad nature of the radio question used here, this result may have more to do with listening to political talk radio programs than traditional mainstream news over the radio. Alas, the data did not allow for discriminating between the two forms of radio content.” • “Media exposure made no difference to those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible but did for those who did not share this view.” (63)

Obama • “And so what would my supporters have me say? How should I respond? Should I say that a literalist reading of the Bible was folly? Should I say that Mr. Keyes, who is a Roman Catholic, should ignore the teachings of the Pope? • Unwilling to go there, I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates - namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois. • But Mr. Keyes's implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.”

Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design. • Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that - regardless of our personal beliefs - constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word "Christian" describes one's political opponents, not people of faith.

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical - if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice. • Imagine Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address without reference to "the judgments of the Lord." Or King's I Have a Dream speech without references to "all of God's children." Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.

What I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. • So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.” • “Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. • I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. • Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. • At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Echo Chambers : The Politics of Diversity