The More Contact Americans Have With Muslims, The More Islamophobic They Are
What, then, can we do to fight Islamophobia? Unfortunately, there is not much evidence that some of the most obvious-sounding solutions might work. One idea might be to increase cultural integration. This is based on the “contact hypothesis”: If more Americans have Muslim neighbors, they will learn not to harbor irrational hate.
We did not find support for this in the data — in fact, we found evidence for the opposite. We looked at searches in the 10 counties with the highest Muslim populations in the United States. On average, these counties are about 11 percent Muslim, compared with 0.9 percent of the United States as a whole. We estimate, in these 10 counties, that anti-Muslim search rates are about eight times higher than they are in the rest of the country.
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