Are Muslims in America assimilating or not?

Since today is the anniversary of 9/11, let's take a moment to see how well Muslims are assimilating in American society.  The General Social Survey (GSS) asked respondents, "Consider a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community claiming that Blacks are inferior, should he be allowed to speak, or not?"

In my view, a core value of the American system is free speech.  If you don't believe in allowing people to state controversial opinions in public, you're not much of an American.

Here are the percentages in favor of free speech by religion.  Many American Muslims are blacks--I excluded them since we would expect many of them to oppose free speech for people with messages that make blacks look bad:

Of all religions, Muslims are the least supportive of free speech.

Have attitudes among Muslims improved or worsened over time?  I divided the data into two periods: 1) pre-2010 and 2) this decade:

Unfortunately, support for allowing someone with controversial racial views to speak in public has fallen among Muslims in this decade from 50.0% to 31.8%.  Not good.

Data: Northern Europeans make the best Americans

American needs smart people, especially those who excel in science.  We also need people who believe in core American values, and I think perhaps the best single General Social Survey question to measure this asks respondents if they feel that someone who believes in racial inferiority should be allowed to give a public speech on the topic. Denying this right to people, in my opinion, is the type of behavior that belongs somewhere else, not America.

To capture which groups score highest on the above qualities, I created a scale that sums measures of IQ, basic scientific knowledge, and favoring free speech.  Here are the mean scores for any ethnic group with at least 10 respondents (sample size = 985):

Mean desirability score

Russian  22.72
English/Welsh  21.73
Swedish  21.43
Norwegian  20.93
Scottish 20.78
Irish  20.56
Jewish  20.54
French  20.47
German  20.28
Dutch  20.27
Polish  20.19
Italian  19.63

Total US  19.61

American Indian  19.07
Chinese  18.55
Spanish  18.15
Black   17.78
Asian Indian  17.42
Portuguese  17.30
Puerto Rican  16.17
Mexican  15.83

Russians score the highest, and northern Europeans, in general, do well.  Southern Europeans and non-whites tend to do poorly.  The gap between Russians and Mexicans is 1 1/2 standard deviations -- an enormous difference.  (I included immigrants to maximize sample size, but rankings don't change much if I exclude them. The Chinese and Mexicans rise a little.)

If the US had a rational immigration policy, we would be growing the top groups.  The country, however, desperately blinds itself to these kinds of facts, so we are growing the bottom instead.

Data: Compared to the 1970s, support for free speech is lower among college-age Americans

Since 1972, General Social Survey participants have been asked the following question: "Consider a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community claiming that Blacks are inferior, should he be allowed to speak, or not?"

I wanted to look at trends among college-age students. Here is a graph (sample size = 2,158):

The green bars indicate the percent who would allow the controversial person to speak. This has fallen from 68.4% during the 1970s to only 48.0% in this decade, a drop of 20 percentage points. 

It looks to me like young people in the 70s were either more open to genetic ideas concerning race, or they were simply more supportive of free speech. 

Another interpretation is that young adults in the 70s were against the establishment and thus favored ideas that challenge the mainstream, while young people today tend to support the establishment and thus support its suppression of unpopular ideas. 

Religion and free speech

GSS respondents were asked if a person who is against churches and religion should be allowed to speak in your community. Here are the percentages who answered yes listed by religious affiliation:

Agrees that anti-religionists should be allowed to speak (sample size = 33,069)

Protestants 65.6
Catholics 73.0*
Eastern Orthodox 91.9*
Christian 76.1*
Nondenominational 84.6*
Jews 83.4*
Muslim 59.3
Hindu 73.9
Buddist 84.7*
No religion 88.7*

A majority in each group, Muslims included, is in favor of free speech. Most groups support it at a higher level than Protestants.  Although not shown, Jews, Orthodox, and those with no religion have significantly higher levels than Muslims.

In results not shown, more religious people (i.e., those who attend services frequently) are less likely to favor allowing the person to speak. This was true of all religions except for Buddhists and Orthodox Christians (three cheers for the Orthodox). The link was by far the strongest for Muslims: religious Muslims are much more likely to favor censorship.

Obama is anti-free speech: Barack, living out the Thug Life, has attempted to shut down Rev. Wright ads put out by National Republican Trust. My Russian friend says it smacks of totalitarianism, and he should know. It's clear that Comrade Obama is salivating over putting the Steveosphere under the guillotine as well, so fight the power with a donation. (Am I mixing too many revolutionary metaphors?)

Indian Americans are least supportive of free speech; Mexicans are 2nd worst: A reader named "hicsto" claims that free speech is a male, northwestern European (MNWE) phenomenon; Jews don't support it as much; and as the influence of MNWEs declines, so will the freedom to speak freely. What do the data tell us (about the American context, anyway)? General Social Survey respondents (all Americans) were asked if a person who believed blacks were inferior should be allowed to speak in public. This is the percent of men by ethnic background who said yes (groups with at least 50 respondents are included with two noted exceptions):


Percent in favor of allowing someone speaking in public about black inferiority

Japanese 82.5 (N=28)
Swedes 78.9
Hungarians 77.8
Scots 74.3
English/Welsh 74.2
Filipinos 72.5 (N=40)
Irish 72.3
Poles 71.0
Danes 70.5
French 70.3
Jews 69.8
Germans 69.8
Norwegians 69.3
Czechs 68.3

USA 67.5

French Canadians 67.2
Austrians 67.2
Italians 66.5
Russians 62.7
Spain 60.8
Chinese 60.0
Dutch 59.1
Blacks 58.8
American Indians 59.5
Puerto Ricans 58.5
Mexicans 49.1
Indians 46.1

Support for free speech among whites may be higher as we move north and west, but the pattern is not perfect. Jews are in the top half of the table, and clearly are not less supportive than other whites. Among non-whites, East Asians are split with Japanese and Filipinos toward the top and Chinese in the bottom half. Other non-whites congregate at the bottom, with the very large immigration group of Mexicans bringing anti-free speech values with them. One's attitude toward free speech is a good indicator of assimilation to mainstream American values, and Mexicans are almost ten percentage points behind blacks on a question about black inferiority!

An invitation to haters: Bill O'Reilly brought a representative from freerepublic.com on to his show the other night to chastise him for not being sufficiently vigilant in banning haters from the website. This was obviously a response to liberals accusing O'Reilly of only pointing out hate sites on the Left, and an attempt to show others that he is not a hater from the Right because he identifies and condemns the real conservative haters.

I have been banned for comments at several websites: liberal and white nationalist websites, and freerepublic.com itself for committing the crime of citing statistics. (I cited UCR data showing that social class does not explain the link between race and street crime. I didn't even say a word about why that would be). Don't worry, Bill, if what you want is to shut down speech you don't agree with (data, in my case)--Free Republic is doing a hell of a job.

So, since I believe in the First Amendment and know what it is like to be treated like an animal--muzzles are for dogs--I offer this invitation to all the so-called haters out there: please come and express yourself at this little blog. I make a solemn vow that, as long as you do not make a call for violence, I will never censor you.

Come all you racists, you homophobes, you Communists. Come all you atheists, you bigots, you anti-Christs. Come all you misogynists, you Bush-haters, you anarchists. Come all you cop-haters, you white-haters, you Bolsheviks.

Come and get that craziness off your chest, and what may sound like hate to some will sound like poetry to me because it's free. And who knows--some of that craziness may actually turn out to be true.

Smart, white, conservative men to the rescue again: I just can't think of very many political values that I cherish more than free speech. So I decided to run a multiple regression with General Social Survey data to identify folks who are its weakest supporters. For my dependent variable, I chose whether or not you favored allowing a racist to speak in public (1 for yes, 0 for no).

Here are the standardized coefficients, from strongest to weakest:


Standardized Coefficients

IQ .15
Years of education .12
Frequency of church attendance -.11
Being a woman -.07
Politically liberal -.05
Being black -.04
Income .03

So, a free speecher is likely to be smart, educated, non-churchgoing, male, conservative, white, and wealthy. The first three are especially important. Generally, I like churchy people, but I suppose they do have an authoritarian streak. But look how it's the libs who want to shut people up. And I'm not surprised that the mommies want to wash our mouths out with soap for saying bad words.

"The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think."
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Arthur Jensen, evil: Richard Dawkins, naughty

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked almost 30,000 Americans if a person who is against church and religion should be allowed to speak in public. In 1972, it was 66.6%, and by 2004--the most recent year available--it was up to 77.5%. It's an encouraging trend, but I'm not sure that it's a reflection of a growing appreciation of free speech as a general principle. Over the years, people have also been asked if a racist should be allowed to speak, and the number has not budged from the 62.0% observed 35 years ago. So it looks like this is simply a matter of more people being comfortable with anti-religion. These numbers also tell us that racism has become more of a taboo than making statements against religion. This is why Arthur Jensen is much more a villain than Richard Dawkins.

Mexicans are (almost) least in favor of free speech: One important indication of assimilation to American society is a belief in free speech. Nothing upsets me more than to hear about some eccentric locked up in a European prison for saying wacky things like there was no Holocaust. They won't lock up actual criminals, but are only too happy to imprison people who say the wrong thing. So let's see which ethnic groups are best assimilated in terms of free speech values. The General Social Survey asked Americans if they feel that anti-religionists should be allowed to speak in their communities. Here is the percent who said yes:


Percent saying anti-religionists should be allowed to speak

Hungarians 81.5
Greeks 79.6
Russians 79.2
Scots 78.9
Yugoslavs 78.2
Swedes 77.8
French 77.3
Norwegians 77.0
Lithuanians 76.5
Filipinos 76.5
English/Welsh 75.4
Italians 74.5
Japanese 73.8
Danes 73.0
Swiss 72.8
Poles 72.8
Irish 72.7
Germans 71.4
Spain 71.4
Finns 71.3

USA 71.2

Belgians 70.7
French Canadians 69.5
Chinese 67.7
Czechs 67.7
Rumanians 67.4
Austrians 66.9
Portuguese 66.2
West Indians 66.0
American Indian 65.1
Blacks 64.8
India 63.2
Arabs 62.5
Mexicans 62.0
Netherlands 61.2
Puerto Ricans 59.3

Roughly speaking, whites and Asians are free speechers, others less so. This, with other evidence I've seen, suggests that white immigrants assimilate best to American society, with Asians being an exception to the rule. Blacks and American Indians show how difficult it can be for non-whites to adopt American ways: they have had hundreds of years to develop a belief in free speech, but have been left behind by even the most recent immigrants. And speaking of recent immigrants (I can never pass up the opportunity to address the Mexican question) Mexicans are almost at the bottom of this list. In an earlier post, they had a similar ranking on the question about allowing racists to speak in public. As Hispanics become a more powerful influence at the ballot box, we might see the day where the things I am writing on this blog could get me a long stretch in the pen.