Abstract
Racism and racial prejudice, considered a relic of obsolete and outdated social systems, is emerging in the depths of ultra-modern Western societies with different characteristics from the past but with a surprising and worrying virulence. These waves of prejudice and racism testify to the many fears that fill the horizons of advanced societies, undermining not only their internal reliability, but also just their democratic settings. This paper presents a critical review of Islamophobia as a racial prejudice, showing that two main definitions are at work: Islamophobia as xeno-racism or linked to the so-called clash of civilizations. Then, it presents the outcomes coming from a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) survey led among a representative sample of the Italian population (n = 1,523) on Antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes. The cogency and structure of anti-Muslim public discourse and connected mass attitudes, revealed by our investigation, confirm the emergency of these two relevant dimensions of Islamophobia, which claim for a more accurate definition of Islamophobia. Moreover, the distribution of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic attitudes illustrate an interesting overlapping of Islamophobia and Antisemitism which claims that racism is multi-targeted and that there is not so much options between Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Finally, we use three main variables—anomie, ethnocentrism, and authoritarianism—as predictors of Islamophobia and Antisemitism. We tested the strength of these three predictors with the aid of path technique based on multiple regression analysis, which helps to determine the direct and indirect impacts of certain independent variables on dependent variables in a hypothetical causal system.
Highlights
Despite what is claimed by fans of neoliberal globalization, societies have not moved to a state of deep and widespread prosperity, free from conflict, hostility, exclusion, and discrimination
It is confirmed by the fact that the 45% of the sample cultivates simultaneously prejudice against Muslims and Jews. This idea pays a tribute to Robert Fine argument sustaining that recently there has been a “methodological separatism” in the field of racial and ethnic studies, which split the study of Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and other kind of racisms in different and often oppositional areas [38]
The firm denial that racist attitudes exist poses a double problem: on the one hand, this denial takes the form of self-exculpatory behaviours considered limited to minority racially or ideologically extreme situations that may justify certain attitudes, and second, that denial is a proper strategy which, by denying the evidence of harmful policies, speeches, statements, does not openly violate the order of public discourse, which obviously is not racist
Summary
Despite what is claimed by fans of neoliberal globalization, societies have not moved to a state of deep and widespread prosperity, free from conflict, hostility, exclusion, and discrimination. Racism and racial prejudice, considered a relic of obsolete and outdated social systems, is emerging in the depths of ultra-modern Western societies with different characteristics from the past but with a surprising and worrying virulence. For ms of racial prejudice, such as Antisemitism, reappear in unexpected forms, presenting new and unpredicted characteristics, whereas Islamophobia seems to challenge, by diffusion, transversality, and essentiality, the worst historical anti-Semitic exhibitions of early twentieth century. These waves of racial prejudice that are passing through all Western countries seem to tackle more with cultural and religious signs of otherness than with differences inscribed upon bodi ly traits. We present the racist predictors pattern we used to explain the nature of this new racism, its liquidity and its final and unexpected function of social bonding
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