After a
white supremacist murdered eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue because of their support for Central American immigrants,
Amy Goodman on
Democracy Now said this about the killer:
Robert Bowers has a history of posting anti-Semitic and xenophobic content.
She put it the same way on the
next show:
Bowers has a history of posting anti-Semitic and xenophobic content and was posting on the far-right social media site Gab until just before the shooting.
The
Washington Post less charitably
called Gab "the white supremacist sanctuary" in a headline.
Xenophobia is a much used word on Democracy Now. It's been used more than two thousand times by
Google's count. It is especially favored when describing Donald Trump. Here are a few examples:
22 July 2016 Title:
Classic Authoritarianism: In a Speech Filled with Fear & Xenophobia, Donald Trump Accepts Nomination
28 September 2016:
In the wake of Monday night’s first presidential debate, the establishment Republican Party and conservative newspapers continue to distance themselves from Donald Trump amid increasing accusations of racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia.
5 September 2017 Title:
Trump Slammed for Siding with “Hate and Xenophobia” by Rescinding DACA for 800,000 “DREAMers”
31 January 2018 Title:
In Xenophobic Speech, Trump Attacks Immigrants, Pushes War with North Korea
Of course, Democracy Now is far from the only
white Left organ to make liberal use of the word xenophobia in the age of Trump. It is widely used as an all encompassing super-category under which a host of hatreds or
"phobias," including racism can be subsumed. For example,
Jacob Bacharach, writing on
Jacobin had a
similar assessment of the Pittsburgh massacre:
"this murder is a project of the political right, who deploy xenophobia and antisemitism to incite senseless violence"
Calling it xenophobia favors the conclusion that it was
"senseless," violence, whereas racist violence has a purpose. It generally serves the economic interests of the capitalist class. Anti-Semitic violence is also employed with a purpose by fascists.
In another example, an article by
Joseph Natoli in
counterpunch, titled
"Über-Globalization or Über-Xenophobia?," 9 September 2016, two months before the election,
promoted the view that xenophobia is the natural root of many ethnic, racial, and religious issues. He begins by quoting
Jim Harrison:
“We are all naturally xenophobic.”
Before going on to say this about what he calls Über-Globalization:
Revolt against this now remains with Trump and his supporters, its manifesto being what I call über-xenophobia, xenophobia being the mildest preamble to the ugliness of the whole.
And this is how he appears to justify this xenophobia:
Indeed, a fear of difference, whether of skin color, religion, language, culinary passion, dress code or shocking idiosyncrasy, is woven into the cloth of our cultural imaginaries.
We saw a big increase in the usage of the word
"xenophobia" on the Left in 2016. That year, the word
"xenophobia" was often mobilized to give a minimalist description to the outright racism of the Trump campaign by those out to defeat Clinton by any means necessary. The cardinal sin of the
white Left in 2016 was to disparage the distinction between what Clinton represented, another vanilla Democratic regime, and what Trump represented, an extreme white supremacist regime with fascist inclinations. For those on the Left telling progressives
"Don't vote! for the lesser of two evils," substituting
"xenophobic" for
"white supremacist" helped cloud the differences, and sell that very bad advice.
In a pre-midterm
Left Voice piece titled
"Democrats Were Not "the Lesser Evil" for the Migrant Caravan," Tatiana Cozzarelli recounted the very bad record the Democratic Party has on Central America and immigration, and then argued that progressives should've sat out the midterm elections that took the House away from Trump sycophants. Under the banner of
"No Votes for an Anti-Immigrant Party," she wanted to see progressives repeat the same mistake that
allowed Trump to win in the first place. She
describes Trump supporters as
"the xenophobes who are terrified of people rushing to the border." I assume she would also include under that umbrella the
"terrified" terrorist who
wrote "Screw your optics, I'm going in" before he massacred eleven Jews in Pittsburgh.
Many on the Left position xenophobia as the higher, all encompassing category, with racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim [Islamophobia] attitudes operating as sub-categories of xenophobia. This is how
John Reiman, who blogs as the
Oakland Socialist, and thinks himself a Marxist, used it in discussions with me. He defines xenophobia simply as
"hatred of foreigners" [email 23/7/2018]:
Yes, the anti-immigration issue is and will be used to build the forces of white supremacy, but you could also put it the other way around. In any case, I think that the xenophobia that is being built also has its own component. And let’s not forget that this is a global development. Yes, white supremacy is often part of it elsewhere, but consider this: The Brexit vote was largely an anti immigrant vote, but a large part of that xenophobic, anti immigrant sentiment was directed against Polish immigrants into Britain.
The Poles and white supremacy
Actually, anti-Polish attitudes have their own phobia -
polonophobia. More to the point is
this BBC News article from 19 July 2012:
The Polish Association of Northern Ireland has called for action after Poland flags were burned in several locations across Belfast on 11 July.
They have described the burning of the flags as "racist intimidation" of the Polish community.
The reason they called it
"racist intimidation" and not
"xenophobic intimidation" is that it was being done by white supremacist gangs that don't consider the Poles to be really
"white," no matter how hard the extreme right-wing government back in Poland tries to be white nationalist. Such are the odd contradictions of
"whiteness."
Because Reiman considers the Poles to be
"white," he thought they would make a good case for why xenophobia, as opposed to white supremacy, was the operative force at work in this case. What he overlooks is that it is the racists that determine who is
"white," and the Poles aren't always considered white.
The white race
was invented in the pre-United States between 1650-1705, after the colonial ruling class decided to solve its labor shortage problems with African slave labor, and needed to cobble together the various European nationalities into
a new synthetic one that would enforce racial slavery. After about 1690,
"white people," and along with the
"white race" even started
showing up in English language dictionaries.
It wasn't easy to get the various European people to give up their native heritages, and buy into this new synthetic
"white race." It isn't widely recognized that the earliest
"whites only" legal restrictions {circa 1670s} were not designed so much as to restrict the rights of the few free blacks, as they were to force anyone who was deemed as qualifying for membership in the white race to apply for membership. Under the new racial laws, if you wanted to own land, do legal business, etc, you had to declare yourself
"white," not English, Irish, French, or German. The white race was created by force, just as the black race was, and by the same people.
Today, the Trump administration wants to put a citizenship question on the US census. It is widely recognized that the promotion of white supremacy {or as the white Left would say "
xenophobia"} is behind this demand. The US census of 1790 recognized only three categories of Americans:
“free whites”,
“other free people”, and
“slaves.” There were many advantages that came with being able to check the
"free whites" box. As for the other categories: White slaves {indentured servants} had existed in abundance in the colonies before lifetime racial slavery had become solidified with the Virginia 1705 Slave Codes. By 1790 they were history.
Still, not all whites were free, and the category of
"other free people" was a multiracial one that included whites still in bondage or prison, free Africans, native Americans, Asians and others such as the Irish, Jews and Slavs, that weren't initially considered white. Reiman may consider the Poles
"white," but they became white much later than white Americans from England, or even Ireland. {
The first prototype for white supremacy was the English oppression of the Irish.}
In a piece titled
"How do you become “white” in America?," Sarah Kendzior describes the status of Polish immigrants in the United States before 1919 in some detail, and then sums it up by concluding:
The Poles, in other words, were not considered white.
In this period when racism is on the rise, there seems to be a lot of obfuscation about just what is racist. Recently,
NBC host
Megan Kelly lost her job after
asking:
"But what is racist? Because you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween,..."
Kendzior gave us a lesser known example of why blackface will forever be associated with racism in her description of how the Poles became white:
In 1919, Irish gangs in blackface attacked Polish neighborhoods in Chicago in an attempt to convince Poles, and other Eastern European groups, that they, too, were “white” and should join them in the fight against blacks. As historian David R. Roediger recalls, “Poles argued that the riot was a conflict between blacks and whites, with Poles abstaining because they belonged to neither group.” But the Irish gangs considered whiteness, as is often the case in America, as anti-blackness. And as in the early 20th century Chicago experienced an influx not only of white immigrants from Europe, but blacks from the South, white groups who felt threatened by black arrivals decided that it would be politically advantageous if the Poles were considered white as well.
Over time, the strategy of positioning Poles as “white” against a dark-skinned “other” was successful. Poles came to consider themselves white, and more importantly, they came to be considered white by their fellow Americans, as did Italians, Greeks, Jews, Russians, and others from Southern and Eastern Europe, all of whom held an ambivalent racial status in U.S. society.
As you can see, the attitude of the Irish to the Poles was all about whether they were to be considered in or out of the white race, so-called xenophobia had little to do with it.
These post-war years were very tumultuous ones for race-relations in the US. During the war, many African Americans migrated North to take part in war production while others went abroad to fight in it. Both were changed by their experiences.
In Chicago, the African American population increased from 44,000 in 1909 to more than 100,000 in 1919, when many veterans were returning to find them in the industrial jobs that were
"whites only" before the war.
"Xenophobic" groups like the
Ku Klux Klan were taking full advantage of these disruptions. The KKK was making a comeback, and bringing racial violence back to the South. There were 64 lynchings in 1918, and another 83 lynchings in 1919. One would hope that such "
xenophobic" lynchings are history, but even now, Monday, 12 November 2018,
CNN is carrying a
story about a white US Senator from Mississippi joking about her desire to sit
"front row" at a
"public hanging," as she faces a 27 November run-off election against her African American opponent.
In the
"Red Summer" of 1919, resentment against the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North prompted by the war came to a head, and race riots broke out in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska and Chicago. The riot in Chicago started on 27 July 1919 after an African American teenager was stoned and drowned to death by a group of white youths because he had strayed over an unofficial segregation line. Police refused to arrest the white man that eyewitnesses said was responsible, and that sparked a week of rioting that saw more than a thousand black families burned out of their homes in violence that also took the lives of 15 whites and 23 blacks.
While some of those homes may have been burned by white men in white sheets, others were burned by white men in blackface. Blackface wasn't just for minstrel shows at the time. As
Christopher Lamberti wrote in Riot Zone: Chicago 1919:
White men in black grease paint posing as African Americans frequently committed crimes in the South around the turn-of-the-century, and in Chicago as early as 1914, when the Defender complained, "With a blackened face crimes of all kinds are committed and laid at the door of an innocent Afro-American." The number of robberies and assaults by white men in blackface increased in Chicago during the early years of the Great Migration.
Characteristically, some of these blackface crimes involved assaults on white women.
Here's an interesting tidbit that turned up in my research: One of the Irish-American gangs that took part in the riot was the
Hamburg Athletic Club.
At the time, the legendary mayor of Chicago (1955-1976),
Richard J. Daley, was a 17 year old member.
A Polish gang member of that period
told researcher
Frederick Thrasher,
“A Jew or a ni@@er can be a pal of mine if he’s a good fellow.” Such was the contradictory position the Poles occupied in the US at the time. It was in the context of this sharp struggle that Chicago's Poles were finally admitted to the white race, less than a hundred years ago! Some might call this a part of the rich history of
"xenophobia," but they would just be misappropriating the history of white supremacy.
It is the racists that get to define the races. Hitler didn't label the Poles white, although he did the English. I'll bet the pro-Brexit
"xenophobes" don't see the Polish immigrants as
"white" either.
The Rise of Xenophobia
Above is a graph of the popularity of word
"xenophobia" from 1800 to 2008, it is based on the Google Books collection as constructed by
Google's Ngram Viewer. It seems to indicate that nobody was describing the attitudes of the Irish or Poles in terms of
"xenophobia" at the time of these events. The word didn't even get noticeable usage until the 1900s. It saw a steady increase in usage after WWII, followed my a kind of leveling off and then its sharpest rise beginning with the Reagan years. No doubt there has been another sharp rise recently that this tool, which only goes to 2008, can't show. Such has been the meteoric rise of xenophobia over its relatively short life.
Fashioned from the
Greek prefix "xeno," and the
Greek suffix "phobia," it has the feeling of being a very old term for a timeless condition. In point of fact, it was coined about 1880. It didn't even exist until the 200+ year regime of racial slavery had been overthrown, and white supremacy was re-positioning itself for the age of imperialism.
Xenophobia is a political term and not a recognized medical phobia. Phobias are legitimate anxiety disorders. Those with a genuine fear of something don't seek out and harass the objects of their
"phobia." Xenophobic harassment is a method of racist control. A part of the
"charm," shall we say, of
"xenophobia" is that it masquerades as a psychological disorder when it decidedly is not one. The same can be said about Islamophobia, homophobia, and the above mentioned polonophobia, for that matter. The use of the suffix
"phobia" in these cases is a fraudulent one, but clearly it has been embraced by the white Left.
Merriam-Webster tells us a bit more about the history of the word:
Word History
The History of the Word 'Xenophobia'
The word isn't as old as you might think
Xenophobia—"fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners"—has the look and feel of a word that has been in the English language for hundreds of years, borne of the tumultuous political climates of the Renaissance and the penchant that many writers back then had for fashioning fancy new words from Latin and Greek. It is not that old. In fact, the word is relatively new (with an emphasis on "relatively"), with all evidence suggesting that it originated near the end of the 19th century. Our earliest citation is from 1880:
Here, however, as in other cases, we are inclined to think that intelligent xenomania is decidedly preferable to the Xenophobia which is of necessity and always unintelligent.
—The Daily News (London, England), 12 April 1880
Xenophobia was formed from a brace of words found in ancient Greek, xenos (which can mean either "stranger" or "guest") and phobos (which can mean either "flight" or "fear"). More...
More History
The use of African slavery in the colonies produced a theory and practise of white supremacy with deep roots that go back to the earliest days of capitalist development. The development of white supremacy was inextricably tied to the creation of the white race itself.
Once richly developed after 200 years of racial slavery, white supremacy became the antecedent from which a multitude of oppressions sprang. It was the model applied to oppress people everywhere, even white workers. For example, the slave owners need to control human reproduction determined much about the status of all women, as white supremacy came to influence the system of domination not only of people of color, but also of nature, and the Earth itself.
How does this compare with the relatively brief history of xenophobia? African slave labor was central to the economic development of the US for a very long time. That was the material basis for the development of white supremacy. This involved detailed and expensive material world elaboration:
Here is just one example from American history:
Thomas Jefferson founded the
University of Virginia so that the sons of slave owners would not be
"corrupted" by a liberal Northern education. A
new appraisal of Jefferson's role in creating UVA,
issued just this year by the university admitted to
“his vision in creating a southern pro-slavery Ivy League school.” He wanted UVA to be
“an institution with slavery at its core.” What this meant is that Jefferson created a university in which
every course was corrupted by white supremacy, because truth could not be allowed to interfere with commerce. Such were the foundations of white supremacy. Upon what pillars does
"xenophobia" stand, beyond the assertion that it is natural and forever?
Since
"xenophobia" as a concept that has earned it own word goes back a little over a hundred years, it is hard to credit it with a long history, or with having great impact on social development before it was recognized. Generally, when it is proposed as a reason for behavior today, it is given no particular foundation in economic development. Instead it is left to stand on its own as though the term explains itself.
Nativism, Tribalism and Identitarian
Two other words often associated with xenophobic behavior, tribalism and nativism, turn out to be older than xenophobia, but not much older.
Etymonline.com dates
nativism from the US anti-immigrant movement ~ 1845, and
tribalism from 1868. Identitarian is too new for Etymonline.com to find, but the Ngram Viewer has it showing up around 1938. Although it is the least used of any on this list, it has been sharply trending up since 1991. It also is
a white supremacist movement by another name.
Here is what the Google Books Ngram Viewer tells us about the usage of white supremacy, xenophobia, nativism, tribalism, and identitarian.
We can see that since 1954, the year of the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, xenophobia had pretty much caught up with white supremacy, and has been running neck-and-neck with it ever since. Tribalism and nativism have been bringing up the rear, with identitarian looking for market share.
In Australia, the
"nativists" adopted
"White Australia" as their policy. Asian immigration was severely restricted, and most Pacific Islanders were deported. When Japan tried to get a racial equality clause included in the Covenant of the League of Nations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Australia collaborated with Britain to block it. Japan's own
Wajin supremacy having developed around 1880, after being influence by white supremacists from the West and their pseudo-scientific ideas about race.
In the United States, the nativists were first represented by the
Native American Party, more commonly called the
Know Nothings.
Abraham Lincoln had no trouble seeing the racism of these
"nativists," he wrote in a 24 August 1855 letter to
Joshua Speed:
I am not a Know-Nothing—that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
From the above we can gather that one difference Lincoln had with the Know Nothings was that he considered
"foreigners and Catholics" to be among the
"classes of white people," and they didn't.
What is being sold to us as xenophobia, nativism, and tribalism are recent elaborations of white supremacy. All were founded long after it, and like symbolic links, have no independent existence without it. Of course, their promoters can always go back and claim various early behaviors represented xenophobia, just as they can claim the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were
"white," no matter what color they really were, or how little attention they paid to it.
When you include racism in the NGram chart, all the others fade towards insignificance.
After racial slavery had finally been overthrown, and while black reconstruction was being overthrown, and white supremacy was being refitted for a larger, if subtler role, under imperialism,
"xenophobia" was created as a way of excusing white supremacy without ever even acknowledging it.
Google Trends show us how
"xenophobia" has been doing lately. I find it curious that it peaked so sharply just when Trump was becoming president.
In Summary
Xenophobia is often used by the white Left to describe the motivation behind the current anti-immigrant movement. They are doing the fascist a great service by promoting this limited framework. Xenophobia is made to stand in as reason enough to explain anti-immigrant attitudes without invoking racism, but the white supremacists who are building the anti-immigrant agitation are consciously trying to create a white supremacist fascist state. They see the anti-immigrant agitation as but a step up the ladder, even while the white Left strives to disguise the danger by explaining away the current movement with talk of
"xenophobia," and such.
What these various white Left commentators are doing is very dangerous because this explanation for racist behavior tend to favor the white nationalist argument for ethnostates. If there is a natural fear of people that are different, say different skin color, maybe the best thing for all is that we go our separate ways. People of color can leave the US, or live under a white apartheid regime. This is genocidal nonsense, but it is what the white nationalists conclude about xenophobia.
It is also dangerous because it divorces racism from its material and historic roots. It favors thinking of racism as simply a personal dislike of the others, so all people can be racists, just as all people can be xenophobic or whatever. It is no longer connected to that long history in which the employers of labor systematically used differences in skin color to divide the laborers between white and black. This opens the door to the situation in which our
"xenophobic" president is publicly accusing African American reporters of being racist.
This too, is part of a plan. Last week Trump verbally attacked three female African American reporters. Observers have noted that he has a record of attacking black women, including
Michelle Obama,
April Ryan,
Abby Phillip,
Brenda Snipes,
Mia Love,
Myeshia Johnson,
Rep. Frederica Wilson,
Jemele Hill,
Susan Rice, and
Rep. Maxine Waters to name a few. This is a program fully supported by Fox News and the rest of the Alt-Right [white supremacist] media. This week they are also loudly blaming a black women for incompetence and voter fraud in Florida. We can expect a lot more of this. They have long vilified African American men, but they understand that if they are to build white support for taking down a people, they must vilify the women as well.
Likewise, the have seized upon the issue of immigration as a gateway to much more extreme white supremacists' policies. They know exactly what they are doing. They have a plan to lead people step by step to accept conditions and commit atrocities that most who consider themselves anti-immigrant would find unthinkable now. The white Left is obliging this white supremacist movement by blaming the current anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim movements on
"xenophobia," and failing to expose its deeper roots and long-term program.
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