Folks invested in harmful myths about Dearborn, Stockton says, have “a social and ideological location within the population. They’re almost all on the right, they’re almost all Republicans, and they’re almost all over a certain age.”
It’s part of a broader cultural battle, said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.“These people feel like they are losing their America, because the true America is reflecting and embracing more diversity,” he said. “… Many are using the politics of fear to galvanize their bases.”
A willingness to believe provably untrue statements has an element of cognitive dissonance, says Rana Elmir, a Dearborn native who is deputy director of the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union.
“When presented with proof, hard evidence, that Dearborn is a thriving and diverse city, that doesn’t comport with the information they’ve already invested a lot of brain power and emotion into believing,” Elmir says. “They can’t imagine journalists and politicians are telling them a lie. They rely on the fear and xenophobia they’ve been fed. At our base, we’re all emotional creatures.”
But there’s something else, Elmir said: “A real lack of intellectual curiosity, empathy and the ‘othering’ of an entire community”—connected, she said, to consistent depictions of Arabs and Muslims in popular media as brutal and foreign.
