Safety As a Social Justice Concern: Muslim Americans' Well-Being and Islamophobia during the 2016 Election Campaign

Background and Purpose:

Anti-Muslim rhetoric in American presidential campaigns emerged as a controversial issue since 9/11 when politicians framed Muslims as a threat to national security. During the 2016 Election Campaign, Republican presidential candidates capitalized on Islamophobia by fomenting fear and promising to protect the US from further attacks. Despite a large body of research on perceived discrimination and health, research on Islamophobia and its impact on mental health is sparse. Since Islamophobia is an emerging concept, in the social sciences, examining its impact on Muslims Americans’ well-being sheds light the needs of this population within the current sociopolitical context.

Methods: 

A cross-sectional web-based survey questionnaire was used to collect data from 1130 Muslim-Americans live across the US.  Participants were recruited through outreach on social networking sites and community-based organization websites in combination with personal networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Facebook). Respondents’ demographic information included age, gender, education, race/ethnicity, household annual income, nativity (US and Non-US born), and immigration status with an option “I’d rather not say,” current marital status, number of children, occupation, location, and religiosity. Perceived religious discrimination related stress was measured by the adopted Perceived Religious Discrimination Scale (PRDS) (Rippy & Newman, 2008), a 32-item scale adapted for use with Muslim Americans from the Race-Related Stressor Scale (RRSS, Loo et al., 2001). We used a shorter version of the PRDS (20 items) to measure stress associated with incidents of discrimination, using two subscales: Personal Religious Prejudice and Stigmatization (PRPS-14 items) and Exposure to a Religiously Discriminatory Environment (ERDE-6 items)

Objectives:

(a) to assess the impact Islamophobia has on Muslim-American Mental health; (b) to assess perceived safety, and quality of Muslim life over a 12-months period; (c) to examine the challenges and experiences of and responses to religious based discrimination.

Results:

The data show that 97.8% of the participants reported experiencing “some/extreme” negative impact from the election campaign, 45.3% have experienced racial hatred; 52.3% felt isolated; 34% reported feeling “very/extremely” unsafe being Muslim in the U.S., while 95.5% heard the media express heated toward Muslims. The results of the regression analyses show that lack of safety was the strongest predictor for each dependent variable; PRD (beta = .50, t=9.89, p < .001) and the Total Impact of Islamophobia (beta = .31, t=5.97, p < .001). It accounted for 37% of the variance in PRD and for 30% of the variance in the Total Impact of Islamophobia.

Conclusions and Implication:

Muslim-Americans are feeling increasingly unsafe in this country despite migrating here seeking political, social, economic, and emotional freedom. Discrimination does not only lead to economic inequality, but it also leads to mental health issues, like perceived religious based stress.   Hence, we are called to confront Islamophobia that leads to social isolation, as Muslims may become increasingly isolated due to a lack of safety, creating social responses to a changing environment, and achieving equal opportunity and justice through research, social policy, social advocacy and practice.