Testing Our Tolerance: American Attitudes Toward Limitations on the First Amendment Rights of Arab and Muslim Americans
Maisha Rashid · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2009
James L. Gibson, political intolerance scholar, observed recently in an article that some people think that the U.S. has “entered a new era of McCarthyism” post 9/11 (Gibson, 2008, p. 97). In 2004, a Cornell University study conducted by Nisbet and Shanahan found that 44% of Americans would support some form of limitation on Arab and Muslim American civil liberties. The present study, conducted at the 2009 Ralph Bunche Summer Institute at Duke University, focused on people’s views on the limitations on the premier civil right – freedom of speech. Is there a correlation between the American people’s opinion of Arabs and Muslims and their support for limitations on freedom of speech? A liner regression was run using Gibson’s CID 2006 dataset which confirmed several hypotheses. Overall, the finding was, the more Americans dislike Arabs, the more likely they are to support limits on free speech.