“Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t”: Perceived Discrimination and the Paradoxes of Assimilation among U.S. Muslims

Abstract

Muslim Americans are a fast-growing minority group within the United States, both demographically and in the public consciousness. National surveys place them among the least liked groups in the U.S. cultural landscape, and throughout the twenty-first century they have often been the target of both high-profile vitriol and common daily abuses. We use logistic regression analyses of nationally representative data from the Pew Research Center’s 2011 Survey of American Muslims to better understand the social predictors of experiencing discrimination among American Muslims. Integrating these analyses with existing literature on minority group assimilation, we find that both patterns of assimilation and resistance to assimilation positively predict experiences of discrimination. These results suggest that American Muslims face no unequivocal path away from discriminatory experiences and inhabit a precarious place where assimilation presents more opportunities for exposure to discrimination and resistance to assimilation leads to sanctions from the dominant culture.