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Arab American Protest: Macro and Micro-level Response to Post-9/11 Repression

Sun, August 17, 12:30 to 1:30pm, TBA

Abstract

Despite the fact that Arab and Muslim Americans have borne the greatest brunt of government and non-state repression in the aftermath of the terrorists’ attacks on September 11, 2001, little attention has been paid to how Arab Americans have responded to it. We document how repression increased Arab American protest-participation at both the micro and macro-level. Coding articles from the Detroit Free Press (1999-2010), we find at the macro-level that Arab American protest in the Detroit area spiked in the aftermath of 9/11 and that there is a strong relationship between anti-Muslim hate crimes and Arab American protest over time. At the micro-level, findings from the Detroit Arab American Survey (2003) show that personally experiencing repression enhances protest participation for those whose Arab identity is not especially salient. We interpret this finding to mean that people unconnected socially or ideologically to a protest community need a moral shock (repression) to be sufficiently motivated to pursue protest causes. Our study pushes theorizing about repression by showing that repression need not target protestors to affect the possibilities of protest; that the state is not the only actor who represses; and that state and non-state repressive actions are often tightly coupled for racial and ethnic minority populations.

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