“Xenophobia” was Dictionary.com’s phrase of the 12 months in 2016, after searches for it surged 938% following the U.Okay.’s Brexit referendum, and surged once more when former president Barack Obama used the phrase in a speech concentrating on then candidate Donald Trump. At a look, the phrase appears historic, because it’s made up of two Greek phrases: “xenos,” which means “stranger,” and “phobos,” which means “worry” or “panic.” However the phrase is definitely neo-Grecian, says George Makari, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical School, and it was coined within the Eighties to explain a mind-set in regards to the first wave of globalization.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of xenophobia is “worry and hatred of strangers or foreigners or something that’s unusual or overseas,” which differs from racism in key methods. Racism is outlined as “a perception that race is the first determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial variations produce an inherent superiority of a specific race.” Mainly, xenophobia is an irrational worry of strangers or foreigners, whereas racism is the assumption {that a} explicit race is inherently higher than one other. Different types of discrimination, like homophobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, goal particular teams, like homosexual folks, Jewish folks, and Muslim folks, whereas xenophobia is directed towards anybody who is taken into account unusual or overseas.
What is the historical past of xenophobia in the USA?
The USA was ostensibly based as a nation of immigrants, however xenophobia has been embedded in its historical past because the starting. In 1751, 25 years earlier than the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, who went on to turn out to be a founding father, expressed his irritation on the inflow of German immigrants. “Why ought to Pennsylvania, based by the English, turn out to be a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so quite a few as to Germanize us as a substitute of our Anglifying them?” he wrote. Founding father Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant, echoed Franklin’s sentiments when he wrote, “How extraordinarily unlikely is it that [immigrants] will carry with them that temperate love of liberty, so important to actual republicanism?”
As America grew previous its infancy as a rustic, xenophobia was not left behind. Within the 1850s, a strong political get together known as “the Know Nothings” was based (so named as a result of it was a secret society and if members had been requested about it, they had been to say they knew nothing). The get together was based on ideas of xenophobia and exclusionism and, in accordance with Smithsonian Journal, “supported the deportation of overseas beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization interval for immigrants; necessary Bible studying in faculties; and the elimination of all Catholics from public workplace.”
Thirty years later, xenophobia was enshrined into federal legislation with the Chinese language Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese language laborers from immigrating to the USA for 10 years. In keeping with Historical past.com, “People on the West Coast attributed declining wages and financial ills to Chinese language employees.” Anti-Asian sentiment continued throughout World Conflict II as Japanese-American internment camps had been established to imprison folks of Japanese ancestry, even when they had been U.S. residents, and strip them of their property and belongings.
How does xenophobia perform within the U.S. now?
On the flip of the twenty first century, xenophobia reached a fever pitch after 9/11. Within the aftermath of the tragedy, Muslims had been profiled, intimidated, and surveilled within the title of nationwide safety. Years later, when Donald Trump, then only a actual property mogul and actuality TV host, unfold the birther conspiracy concept about President Barack Obama, it was a chilling preview of what was to come back in Trump’s marketing campaign and eventual presidency. Xenophobic views turned one of many defining tenets of Trumpism.