Arab American Protest in the Terror Decade: Macro- and Micro-Level Response to Post-9/11 Repression

Arab Americans have borne the greatest brunt of government and non-state repression in the aftermath of the terrorists' attacks on September 11, 2001. In this study, we document how post-9/11 repression affects Arab American protest at the macro and micro level. Coding articles from the Detroit Free Press (1999-2010), we find at the macro level that Arab American protest in the Detroit area spiked in the aftermath of 9/11 and that there is a strong temporal relationship between anti-Arab/Muslim hate crime and protest. At the micro level, results from the Detroit Arab American Study (2003) show that personally experiencing repression enhances protest participation most strongly for those whose Arab identity is not especially salient. We interpret this finding to mean that such individuals experience repression as a moral shock and/or quotidian disruption and hence such encounters especially motivate them to protest. This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that repression can be especially mobilizing for those who under other circumstances would be least likely to protest. Our study pushes theorizing about repression by highlighting that the state is not the only actor who represses; that repression need not target protestors to affect the possibilities of protest; and that state and non-state repression is often tightly coupled for racial and ethnic minority populations.