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“Xenophobia” was Dictionary.com’s word of the year in 2016, after searches for it surged 938% following the U.K.'s Brexit referendum, and surged again when former president Barack Obama used the word in a speech targeting then candidate Donald Trump. At a glance, the word seems ancient, as it’s made up of two Greek words: “xenos,” meaning “stranger,” and “phobos,” meaning “fear” or “panic.” But the word is actually neo-Grecian, says George Makari, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, and it was coined in the 1880s to describe a way of thinking about the first wave of globalization.
Merriam-Webster's definition of xenophobia is “fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or anything that is strange or foreign,” which differs from racism in key ways. Racism is defined as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Basically, xenophobia is an irrational fear of strangers or foreigners, while racism is the belief that a particular race is inherently better than another. Other forms of discrimination, like homophobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, target specific groups, like gay people, Jewish people, and Muslim people, while xenophobia is directed toward anyone who is considered strange or foreign.
What's the history of xenophobia in the United States?
The United States was ostensibly founded as a nation of immigrants, but xenophobia has been embedded in its history since the beginning. In 1751, 25 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, who went on to become a founding father, expressed his irritation at the influx of German immigrants. “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them?” he wrote. Founding father Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant, echoed Franklin’s sentiments when he wrote, “How extremely unlikely is it that [immigrants] will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?”
As America grew past its infancy as a country, xenophobia was not left behind. In the 1850s, a powerful political party called “the Know Nothings” was founded (so named because it was a secret society and if members were asked about it, they were to say they knew nothing). The party was founded on principles of xenophobia and exclusionism and, according to Smithsonian Magazine, “supported the deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office.”
Thirty years later, xenophobia was enshrined into federal law with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States for 10 years. According to History.com, “Americans on the West Coast attributed declining wages and economic ills to Chinese workers.” Anti-Asian sentiment continued during World War II as Japanese-American internment camps were established to imprison people of Japanese ancestry, even if they were U.S. citizens, and strip them of their property and belongings.
How does xenophobia function in the U.S. now?
At the turn of the 21st century, xenophobia reached a fever pitch after 9/11. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Muslims were profiled, intimidated, and surveilled in the name of national security. Years later, when Donald Trump, then just a real estate mogul and reality TV host, spread the birther conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama, it was a chilling preview of what was to come in Trump's campaign and eventual presidency. Xenophobic views became one of the defining tenets of Trumpism.
According to Makari, who authored Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, xenophobia is a powerful political weapon. “There’s a super-complex problem — globalization, social media, this new world we live in… and xenophobic views offer a very simple answer,” Makari explains. “It secures a common enemy.”
Makari recalls a quote from celebrated journalist H.L. Mencken that says for every difficult, complex problem, there’s a simple, clear answer that’s wrong. In many political situations, xenophobia is the simple, clear, wrong answer, and the scapegoated group is socially determined, Makari says. In European countries that are largely Christian, the scapegoated people may be Jewish; in the American South, the scapegoated people may be Black.
The 2010s were marked by refugee crises as millions of people fled to Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as a result of climate change, war, and political unrest. In European countries such as Italy, Hungary, and Austria, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies flourished, while far-right politicians with xenophobic views continue to surge in popularity from France to the Netherlands to Italy to the U.S. When Trump rose to power in 2016, he carried his xenophobic views into the Oval Office and enshrined some of them into law, including the Muslim ban, which prohibited immigration from several majority-Muslim countries. Trump disparaged Mexicans as criminals, pledging to build a “beautiful” wall to keep them out, and rescinded protections for undocumented youth by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In the United Kingdom, the Brexit referendum was found to be based on xenophobic views, not economic insecurity.
When COVID-19 began sweeping the U.S. in 2020, xenophobia raged again, with many people — including politicians like then president Trump — calling the virus “the Wuhan flu” or “the China virus.” The spread of anti-Asian racism was accompanied by a surge in violence, such as the Atlanta spa shooting where eight women, most of whom were of Asian descent, were murdered. A report published by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian hate crimes rose by 339% between 2020 and 2021.
What can we do to stop the tide of xenophobia?
Helen Jun, a Los Angeles-based therapist who specializes in racial trauma, says racial trauma is unique from other types because it can be hard to recognize. Often patients who seek her services don’t know they’re experiencing racial trauma, but they come in with its symptoms: depression, feeling unsafe, hopelessness in light of racist encounters, and even intrusive memories of racist events. Just the diagnosis of racial trauma can be soothing, Jun says. “The strength of a trauma diagnosis is that it externalizes the source of a pathology. It’s saying, ‘Something terrible happened to you,’ not ‘Something is wrong with you,’” Jun explains. “It’s naming that the psychopathology is not inherent to these individuals but the result of a systemic trauma.”
Both Makari and Jun point out that xenophobic views thrive in isolation. When people who hold xenophobic views are exposed to the people they hold those views about — whether through work or school or sports — those views are challenged. (“That’s why segregation was such a disaster,” Makari says. “It allowed these things to live eternally.”) Jun says that psychologists are aware that the most effective way to challenge xenophobic attitudes is interpersonal interaction, but it’s unfortunate that the solution puts undue weight on the people experiencing discrimination. That’s why, Jun says, it’s important for allies to shoulder some of that work: “Allies can do that work for their friends or do it interpersonally. The most effective way to do it is interpersonally.”
The media we consume can also help challenge xenophobic views, Makari says. Movies and social media can be used to reinforce negative stereotypes or to combat them. Celebrating other cultures, donating to organizations that support marginalized populations, and standing up for people in minority groups are other ways to combat the tide of xenophobia and embrace the diversity of the world we live in.
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