XENOPHOBIC IN AMERICA

Xenophobic in America

Xenophobic in America

Xenophobia is an irrational, deep-rooted fear of or antipathy towards foreigners. It comes from the Greek words ????? (xenos), meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and f?ß?? (phobos), meaning "fear." Xenophobia can manifest itself in many ways involving the relations and perceptions of an ingroup towards an outgroup, including a fear of losing identity, suspicion of its activities, aggression, and desire to eliminate its presence to secure a presumed purity. Xenophobia can also be exhibited in the form of an "uncritical exaltation of another culture" in which a culture is ascribed "an unreal, stereotyped and exotic quality". (Bolaffi 2003)

That is the key word here: not “that which is foreign or strange”, particularly at a time when the fear being stoked is of things that are not really foreign or strange. Immigrants to the US from Spanish-speaking countries are not in fact foreign in a country where large areas of the west and southwest were populated by Spanish speakers long before that territory was integrated into the US. Their culture is not in fact strange in a country where fast food includes not only burgers and fries, but tacos and burritos. Followers of Islam may seem easier to exoticize: assumed not to have been part of the original waves of occupation of the North American territory that wrested control from Native Americans, and suspect for following a religion outside a claimed Judeo-Christian core of values.

Yet this is simply historical ignorance: as The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States indicates, Muslims immigrated to the country between 1880 and 1914 in considerable numbers. Historical records show that the initial Dutch settlement of what today is New York included a prominent landowner, Anthony Janszoon van Salee, who was a practicing Muslim. Enslaved or formerly enslaved Africans who came to the Americas under the Spanish empire, or through the slave trade, also included numbers of practicing Muslims, perhaps as many as 10% of the enslaved population. It bears repeating: this country was religiously and culturally pluralistic from the beginning. (OED 2004)

And regrettably, this country has a history of fear of that very diversity. In 1999, the Houston Catholic Worker published an article by Brian Frazelle documenting the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US as early as the 1840s, noting that “Chances are, what is said today about Hispanic immigrants was once said about your own ancestors.” Don't believe it? consider this case that Frazelle describes where immigration from a foreign country to a specific state reaches the point that: the immigrant population becomes so great that the public school system institutes bilingual education in many areas. … One disgruntled state legislator declares, “If these people are Americans, let them speak our language.” Does this story describe California or Texas in the 1990s? No, it describes Nebraska in the early part of this century. The immigrants in question are German immigrants. Millions of Germans and Irish, including some of my ancestors, composed the first unwelcome wave of immigrants ...