Economic anxiety, not general racism, best predicts anti-Muslim feeling

Evidence

Feelings Scale loaded onto a unidimensional factor that was distinguished from, but positively correlated to four other factors, namely, negative attitude with regard to asylum seekers and illegal residents (r = .62), cultural xenophobia (r = .60), blatant racism (r = .50), and economic xenophobia (r = .69). It is noteworthy that in a regression model of the four factors, economic xenophobia had the largest effect in predicting anti-Muslim feelings while blatant racism (targeted towards all other racial groups; e.g., “Not all races are equally intelligent”) was the only factor that did not predict anti-Muslim feelings. — Ummul-Kiram Kathawalla, Fei Bi Chan, Quratulain Gulamhussein, Amy Riegelman, and Moin Syed, Conceptualization and Measurement of…, 576

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the ongoing debate over whether Islamophobia is a form of racism or an economics-driven prejudice — connects to the discipline’s core definitional dispute.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Islamophobia isn’t racism — it’s the recession talking,’ using the multivariate finding that blatant racism was the lone non-predictor.