3 ms·
>Xenophobia answered the plaintive colonizer’s question: why do they hate us? The response had nothing to do with land grabs, theft, indentured servitude, or oc
by twofornone 5y ago
>Xenophobia answered the plaintive colonizer’s question: why do they hate us? The response had nothing to do with land grabs, theft, indentured servitude, or occupation. Nor was this an exercise in Romanian-style ultra-nationalism. This xenophobia was due to an in-born condition, a reflexive fear and hatred of all strangers that, anthropologists duly explained, stemmed from the racial inferiority of these primitives. Race-based xenophobia became the missing piece of the colonists’ puzzle.
I guess the takeaway is that the term "xenophobia" was just as much of a shallow, falsely dismissive rhetorical technique originally as it is today, used to underhandedly deflect from legitimate grievances regarding forced integration and cultural erasure.
- Barrin92 5y agoNo, the takeaway is given at the end "Only by remembering xenophobia’s first instantiation do we bring these broader battles into focus. For the contested ground named by Jean Martin de Saintours became far more than a matter of semantics; it buttressed aspects of Western ethics, psychology, science, economics, and political power. In the end, what was at stake was nothing less than fundamental notions of identity — of I and thou, us and them, stranger and host — that had been thrown into question by new forms of global interconnection and radical technological change, disruptions not unlike the ones we face today." That the changing, ambivalent, and contradictory nature of the term is a reflection of a history that is just as complex. To yet again simplify language and to immediately tie it to a perceived grievance politics today would be making the same mistake that some people made then.
- renbrom446 5y agoDo you think Palestinians are just xenophobic of Jews?