(The Chronicle of Philanthropy) — “This is going to suck for Muslims here,” my 15-year-old son said morosely as we watched the news that the United States and Israel had launched a military attack on Iran.
He’s right. Every time the United States is at war with an enemy associated with Islam, it leads to a rise in Islamophobia in this country.
The FBI statistics include hate crime incidences such as arson attacks on mosques. But Islamophobia also rears its ugly head in casual comments in high school hallways. I have painful memories of this growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When the Ayatollah Khomeini led “Death to America” chants in the streets of Tehran, kids in my high school cafeteria joked that we should be chanting “Death to Muslims” in the streets of Chicago — while giving me menacing looks.
Certainly, this is a form of racism, but it is also how human minds naturally work. We develop generalizations about categories of people based on easily available information and then apply those generalizations to all members of that group. Repeated media images of Muslims engaged in violent acts create associations between Muslims and violence, leading to stereotypes of regular Muslims at work, school, and elsewhere. The scholar Daniel Kahneman calls this our “system 1” thought process. It is immediate, intuitive, and involuntary.
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