Xenophobia

Xenophobia comes from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), meaning "strange," "foreigner," and φόβος (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.

Quotes

• Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.
  • Eric Hobsbawm, in Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999) , in p. 41.

• As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
  • Eric J. Hobsbawm, in Mapping the Nation (Mappings Series) (13 November 2012), p. 263.

• As soon as I changed my name, I got the jobs. I had one audition as Krishna Bhanji and they said, "Beautiful audition but we don't quite know how to place you in our forthcoming season." I changed my name, crossed the road, and they said when can you start?
  • Ben Kingsley, in "Sir Ben Kingsley's Identity Is as Colourful as His Characters; Sir Ben Kingsley On His Identity and New Film 'Learning to Drive'," Radio Times (19 June 2016)

• Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.
  • Lawrence M. Krauss, in Religious Liberty Equal Freedom to Discriminate? (28 May 2012)

• The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health, social and economic crisis. Historical comparisons are few, particularly in recent decades. [...] What we have witnessed so far is cause for alarm. The institutional xenophobia of the state form is becoming especially manifest just as we are gaining increasing awareness of the lethal danger the virus poses for all humanity. The European states responded to the initial spread of the coronavirus in a totally uncoordinated fashion. Very quickly, most European states — Central Europe in particular — locked themselves behind the administrative walls of their national territory in order to protect their population from the "foreign virus," and the first countries in Europe to cloister themselves in were also the most xenophobic. This set the tone throughout Europe and the rest of the world: every state must look after their own — to the delight of the extreme right in Europe and elsewhere. And nothing has been more abject than the lack of solidarity with the most affected countries. Italy's abandonment by France and Germany — who pushed selfishness to new heights by refusing to send Italy medical equipment and protective masks — sounded the death knell for a Europe built on a foundation of generalized competition between states.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• African state has constructed and fed the idea and practice of xenophobia. At its conceptual heart, xenophobia is a fear of the ‘other’, with the ‘other’ most often being defined by differential (contemporary) nation-state ‘membership’.
  • Dale T. McKinley, in Struggle with no borders: Capitalism, nationalism and xenophobia in South Africa (2 October 2008)

• Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.
  • Anna Quindlen, in Loud and Clear, p. 307.

• Time and again we see leaders and members of religions incite aggression, fanaticism, hate, and xenophobia - even inspire and legitimate violent and bloody conflicts.
  • Parliament of Religions (1993), in A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics (9 March 1998) quoted by Hans Kung, p. 143.

• The fanciful notion still prevails among scholars that xenophobia is a global phenomenon identical in all societies beset by insecurity as a result of cultural crisis.
  • Chengiah Rogers Ragaven, in Social Limits to Learning: Essays on the Archeology of Domination, Resistance, and Experience (01 January 2005, p. 123.

• My theory is Xenophobia is the originating phenomenon to which each of these forms of discriminatory. The phenomenon of Xenophobia a special case of perfectly general human intellective disposition to literal self preservation i.e. the preservation of the internal rational coherence and integrity of the self against anomalous data that threaten it.
  • Robin May Schott, in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, p. 50.

• Xenophobia is a fear of individuals who look or behave differently than than those one is accustomed to.
  • Robin May Schott, in “Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant], p. 48.

• Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression.
  • Antonio Tabucchi, in I lost a reference with whom I"..want to be someone else but without ceasing to be[me … (27 March 2012)].

• We must maximize our efforts to counter violent extremism, radicalization and recruitment in the United States, and stop using xenophobia and ethnic stereotyping. If we are going to move forward and protect this nation, we must recognize trends in terrorist activity.
  • Bennie Thompson, in Terrorists are not just Muslims (27 January 2011

• Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.
  • Desmond Tutu, in God Is Not A Christian (5 May 2011)], p. 51.

External links

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Xenophobia