Background
America has built up its reputation on a global scale as the so-called “melting pot” of the world. Today, the United States has one of most racially and ethnically diverse populations in the world, being made up of 63.7% Whites, 17.1% Hispanic and Latino Americans, 13.2% African Americans, as well as millions of others with varying racial and ethnic backgrounds (Census). Somewhat ironically, it’s this ethnic and racial diversity that has brought about centuries of prosperity and cooperation, as well as pervasive racism, and xenophobia. However, xenophobia, the fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign due to a feared sense of threatening, is unsurprisingly common across the globe (Merriam-Webster).
E. B. Dubois, this fear is be identified as internalised xenophobia. The ideology behind internalised xenophobia is that the historical and current systems of White-on-Black violence and oppression send messages of Black inferiority that are so overwhelmingly powerful that the white populus, and many Black people, succumb to them, ultimately becoming defined by them (Fanon). This means that within a culture, for example as specified by Dubois, the Black culture, systems created by the majority that actively degrade Black Americans become so pervasive and detrimental that members of the culture begin to fear each other just as much as the majority fears them due to their subconscious conditioning. An example of this in contemporary society would be the socioeconomic ghettoization of Black Americans into communities where it is incredibly hard to escape poverty, and as a result not only does media portray Blacks as criminals, but more importantly members of these communities have internalised this message as a part of themselves, causing internal cultural conflict, and the belief that perhaps that is true even within the culture itself. Now to establish the existence of xenophobia as a trend, it is important that one looks historically to understand the causes of these in particular.
First when examining primal xenophobia, the largest example of which is evident in chimpanzees, it is important to look to research conducted
When Europeans crossed the sea to reach North America, they came with set ideas of who truly had control of the land, and who neither had nor deserved it. Those fitting the latter classification were the Native Americans, the indigenous population of North America. On arrival, the settlers began a decades long phenomenon I refer to as geographic xenophobia. In this phenomenon, instead of race or ethnicity and the primal urge to stay within their established group, it is the geographic composition of the group. Native Americans were not murdered, driven off their land, romanticized, forcefully assimilated, artificially bound, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as Indians but as the rightful landowners and occupants (Wolfe). The European settlers came over knowing that Native Americans existed. However, they expected complacency in removing them from their land under the guise that it was rightfully, as established by god, theirs (Thornton). When they realized that the Native Americans would not leave their land without a struggle, geographic xenophobia arose in the sense that settlers feared they would not be able to keep their “god given”
To many of the English colonists, any land that was granted to them in a charter by the English Crown was theirs’, with no consideration for the natives that had already owned the land. This belittlement of Indians caused great problems for the English later on, for the natives did not care about what the Crown granted the colonists for it was not theirs’ to grant in the first place. The theory of European superiority over the Native Americans caused for any differences in the way the cultures interacted, as well as amazing social unrest between the two cultures.
“Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” by Patrick Wolfe In this reading the author argues that genocide and the elimination of the American Native population through colonial settlement are inextricably linked, though are not always the same. Also,during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Indian tribes located in the Southeast United States were forcibly removed from their homes and ordered to relocate to the
Since its inception, there has always been a subsection of the American people that think that sharing a country with people different than them is unacceptable. Whether it was the 5 tribes of Native Americans relocated in the Trail of Tears, or the prejudice against irish immigrants during the turn of the century, white anglo-saxon protestants have always tried to ‘stick together’ and keep others unlike them out. With the end of the civil war and an end to slavery, this nativism present within the American people manifested itself once more. While the journey taken by African-American citizens was long and unnecessarily arduous, the backlash against them has waxed and waned as time passes. During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was at it’s peak,
Throughout history, Americans have always been intimidated by immigrants. The idea of an immigrant coming to America and easily being able to get a job scared Americans. Americans feared that good jobs would be taken from hard working Americans and given to immigrants for less pay because they required less money to live on or were used to no wages or lower wages in their Country of origin. People would immigrate to America in search of a better life, and often times they could find homes and jobs that made them want to stay. A melting pot is described as being a mixing of different cultures into one universal culture. In Erika Lee’s, The Chinese Exclusion Example, immigrant exclusion helped re-define the melting-pot
American Indians shaped their critique of modern America through their exposure to and experience with “civilized,” non-Indian American people. Because these Euro-Americans considered traditional Indian lifestyle savage, they sought to assimilate the Indians into their civilized culture. With the increase in industrialization, transportation systems, and the desire for valuable resources (such as coal, gold, etc.) on Indian-occupied land, modern Americans had an excuse for “the advancement of the human race” (9). Euro-Americans moved Indians onto reservations, controlled their education and practice of religion, depleted their land, and erased many of their freedoms. The national result of this “conquest of Indian communities” was a steady decrease of Indian populations and drastic increase in non-Indian populations during the nineteenth century (9). It is natural that many American Indians felt fearful that their culture and people were slowly vanishing. Modern America to American Indians meant the destruction of their cultural pride and demise of their way of life.
Xenophobia derived from the Greek word for stranger, means the fear of outsiders or foreigners or of anything that is strange and/or foreign (Winters). Foreigners tend to scare people because people usually do not like change and it takes awhile to adapt to and understand how and why people are the way they are. People fear outsiders because the fear of otherization and the unknown scares people and “turns them off” from those who are different, and causes people to form stereotypes from events that have happened throughout the past.
Because Blacks are stereotyped to be "uncivilized", whites have the "private fears to be projected onto the Negro." (96) Fear only promotes further racism, and the labyrinth of attitudes. He states that the problem with racial oppression will never be resolved unless the white man gives up his power.
They face many issues such as economic instability, depression, loneliness, fear of being alone and feeling betrayed. Children feel depressed in cases like this because even at a young age they know that things are not okay. They also suffer from fear and being betrayed, they suffer fear because they 're scared of what is going to happen to their family since they 're so used to having their family together. Many times children who face this situations feel like they’ve been betrayed because they don’t know why their mother or father have gone away and not came back. The psychologist mentions that it’s very normal for children to feel this way and conduct a different behaviour than usual because just like everyone else they don’t seem to understand
Following the 1890’s, the world began to undergo the first stages of globalization. Countries and peoples, who, until now, were barely connected, now found themselves neighbors in a planet vastly resembling a global village. Despite the idealized image of camaraderie and brotherhood this may seem to suggest, the reality was only discrimination and distrust. Immigration to new lands became a far more difficult affair, as emigrants from different nations came to be viewed as increasingly foreign. In the white-dominated society of the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the only way to truly count oneself as American was to become “white”. For this reason, the idea of race, a socially constructed issue with no real physical basis, has become one of the most defining factors which shape immigration and assimilation in the United States.
Racism (n): the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other race (Wordnet search, 1), a controversial topic in today’s society, a subject that many people try to sweep under the rug, but yet a detrimental problem that has been present in America since the colonial era. Will this dilemma come to a halt? Can all Americans see each other as equals despite their skin color and nationality; and what role has it played in past generations versus today’s generations and how will it affect our future? Has this on going way of thinking gotten better or worse? These are questions raised when many think about the subject; especially members of American ethnic groups and backgrounds, because most have dealt with racial discrimination in their life time.
Native Americans lived on the land that is now called America, but when white settlers started to take over the land, many lives of Native Americans were lost. Today, many people believe that the things that have been done and are being done right now, is an honor or an insult to the Natives. The choices that were made and being made were an insult to the Native Americans that live and used to live on this land, by being insulted by land policies, boardings schools and modern issues, all in which contain mistreatment of the Natives. The power that the settlers and the people who governed them had, overcame the power of the Natives so the settlers took advantage and changed the Natives way of life to the
The movement westward during the late 1800’s created new tensions among already strained relations with current Native American inhabitants. Their lands, which were guaranteed to them via treaty with the United States, were now beginning to be intruded upon by the massive influx of people migrating from the east. This intrusion was not taken too kindly, as Native American lands had already been significantly reduced due to previous westward conquest. Growing resentment for the federal government’s Reservation movement could be felt among the native population. One Kiowa chief’s thoughts on this matter summarize the general feeling of the native populace. “All the land south of the Arkansas belongs to the Kiowas and Comanches, and I don’t want to give away any of it” (Edwards, 203). His words, “I don’t want to give away any of it”, seemed to a mantra among the Native Americans, and this thought would resound among them as the mounting tensions reached breaking point.
Shelby, T. (2002) “Is Racism in the Heart?” In G. L. Bowie, M. W. Michaels, and R. C. Solomon (Eds.), Twenty Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (479-483). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
Racism is one of the most revolting things within the vicinity of humanity. Many times it haunts our past, degrading our future. However, a good fraction o...
Tishler, William P. and Stanley K. Schultz. "Racist Culture." Review 5 2007 n. pag. Web. 29 Nov. 2014.