Rethinking Fear and Protest: The Post-9/11 Mobilization of Arab Americans in Detroit

• In Event: 329 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Paper Session. New Directions in the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Movements

Abstract

Most scholars believe that fear is a barrier to protest participation unless it is suppressed or transformed. Surprisingly, however, few have examined if fearful individuals are in actual fact less likely to protest than those unafraid. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we believe that in the context of a repressive environment, individuals who are afraid protest more than people without fear. Fear is likely coupled with an awareness of injustice, felt grievances, in-group solidarity, as well as other emotions such as anger – all of which serve as motivation to protest. Moreover, fear itself is a motivation in that people can protest against the emotional toll that fear has on them. While we underscore the mobilization benefits of fear, our argument is more nuanced in that we recognize that extreme fear can paralyze and thus likely demobilizes. These claims are investigated using the Detroit Arab American Study (2003), a representative sample of Arab Americans shortly after 9/11. Multivariate analyses support our curvilinear thesis: Arab Americans with intermediate levels of fear protest more than people unafraid as well as those with a great deal of fear. Our findings suggest that fear can be a useful tool for organizers and may even need to be heightened to transform constituents into adherents. More generally, our focus on the causal role of emotions highlights that hostile contexts and the grievances they generate do not mechanistically determine protest participation. Rather, how people emotionally interpret grievances matter as well.

Authors

• Marian Azab, UNM Department of Sociology and Criminology

• Wayne Santoro, University of New Mexico