XENOPHOBIA BEGAN AS a psychiatric diagnosis for an irrational fear of others and, a bit more commonly, as a way to describe how ultranationalists saw external enemies everywhere. Afterward, it migrated and now named a full-blown crisis as Western imperialism stretched out across the globe, and rebellions were sparked in China, Morocco, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. Xenophobia then functioned as a crude map: the accuser would be from the civilized West, and the xenophobe from the wild and primitive East. Like other Orwellian abstractions—border pacification, colonizing mission, and racial science—xenophobia quickly began its somersault into irony. Soon, it seemed that this accusation would be left at the lexical dump, junked for being no more than dressed-up name-calling, its use an example of xenophobic aversion itself.
Instead, this term was rescued by those who recognized xenophobia in their own kind. This transformation from convenient accusation to unflattering mirror was part of a longer tradition of self-inquiry heralded by Las Casas, Montaigne, and other moralists who accused their own nations and people of stranger hatred. As waves of immigrants swept forth in the late nineteenth century, a call for self-reflection followed, as did newly apt descriptions such as Georg Simmel’s “stranger,” Robert Park’s “marginal man,” and all those trapped in what W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” Hyphenated beings like the Polish-Englishman Joseph Conrad, European Jews like Freud, Boas, and Adorno, and African Americans like Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison reported from within and without. They were joined by once colonized rebels like Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, women like Simone de Beauvoir, and sexual minorities like Michel Foucault. Thanks to these and other efforts, cloaks of invisibility were torn away. During the second half of the twentieth century, cries of “Go back where you came from!” now had a clinical-sounding name, though this was no medical disorder. More disturbingly, as psychologists amply demonstrated, this darkness lurked in the most destructive corner of the everyday mind.
After the Holocaust, the idea that strangers were by definition blood enemies became widely seen as a murderous fallacy. For those who once followed Thomas Hobbes on the brute struggle between men, Herbert Spencer on the survival of the fittest, or Carl Schmitt on politics as the need for enemies, there were harsh rebukes that came from places like Treblinka. As trade and technology pulled the world’s peoples closer, others pointed to cooperation as the natural state of complex societies. In 1947, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish Lithuanian exile and adopted Frenchman, flipped Hegel over and proposed that the encounter between the I and the Other was not based on a struggle for supremacy. When we stand face-to-face, he proposed, I immediately recognize your common humanity and become responsible for you. Mutual responsibility was the actual state of being; dominance and objectification were the immoral rejection of that intersubjective dependence.
As widespread efforts took up the complex mix of identity, affect, and group affiliation that comprised xenophobia, this phenomenon became atomized, broken up into different professional discourses, and called by other names. Microanalyses and narrow explanations that focused on individuals and discrete groups emerged from within models of human behavior which targeted conditioned fear responses, cognitive prejudice, forms of paranoid projection, and the process of Othering. Four different root systems. No single tree.
And so it remains. No grand synthesis or novel paradigm has since emerged. However, there has been the creation of much knowledge. Biologists have furthered our understanding of anxiety, phobias, and trauma. Researchers, for example, startled the scientific world when they showed that traumatized rats passed on the effects of chronic stress, via altered modulators of gene expression. Epigenetics confirmed the possibility that a parent’s anxiety might result in a child more physiologically prone to phobias. The impressive work of Joseph LeDoux demonstrated how conscious experiences of fear—based on memory, inner schemas, sensory processing, and bodily feedback—took place in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Being consciously scared was thus distinguishable from amygdala-based, nonconscious threat reactions, which drove physiological responses without the inner experience of fear. Fascinating studies like these indicate how much more we have to learn about fear, trauma, violence, and their biology.
Cognitive scientists have conducted a vast number of studies on our assumptions regarding outsiders. Timothy Levine, whose Truth-Default Theory was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, argued that we often are duped into trusting others who seem like us. Hugo Mercier concluded that such credulousness was exaggerated; his research indicated that we routinely remain vigilant, searching other minds for evidence of frauds, phonies, and sharks. A specific nuance was added by Daniel Ames, who discovered that when the Xenophanic projection—I’m like you—broke down, stereotypes stepped in, defining—rightly or wrongly—what was ambiguous. The power of these cognitive schemes to determine behavior was furthered by the discovery of “stereotype threat,” in which children of a socially maligned group tended to conform to those negative assumptions.
Social psychologists have struggled to locate the forces that sweep up crowds, for experiments that isolate a single variable in groups are extremely difficult to construct. Much work has followed an old, but still seminal study, often described as Lord of the Flies brought to life. In 1954, the psychologist Muzafer Sherif gathered “well-adjusted” boys of like “kind and background” at Robbers Cave, a camp in Oklahoma. Divided into teams, the children were surreptitiously observed. Sherif and his “camp counselors” reported three major findings. When placed in direct competition for a prize, the boys quickly polarized. They established friendships only in their group, and over time they devolved into little monsters who taunted their hated rivals, burned the other team’s flag, and raided their cabins. Once this us-versus-them dynamic took shape, increased contact—Gordon Allport’s hope—failed. Hanging out over hot dogs did not increase empathy and cooperation. However, when the “counselors” cut off the camp’s sole water supply, this crisis made prior animosities melt away. Rivals joined hands to meet the moment.
The Robbers Cave experiment became a touchstone, in part because no one could quite figure out what it meant. This strife, while not based on pre-existing stereotypes, seemed to demonstrate how communal animus could be easily whipped up. But why? Sherif’s Realistic Conflict Theory attributed the intergroup aggression to objective concerns over scarce resources. Others found evidence for a quite opposite view. No boy was starving. No one needed to burn the other team’s flag. Social Identity Theory suggested that the boys’ affiliations drove their bellicosity.
As this debate made clear, there was a need for more precise ways to distinguish why some groups embraced coexistence while others fumed and flared. At London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, Wilfred Bion believed that he had the answers. Assigned four hundred mentally “disabled” soldiers and low on manpower, Dr. Bion made a virtue out of necessity. He created “therapeutic groups” and required each recovering veteran to join up. Different clusters focused on set tasks like woodworking or map-reading. While some teams got on with it, others fell prey to destructive digressions and furious conflicts. Little got done. Why?
Boys from Sherif’s camp experiments
For groups to function, Bion concluded, three basic “assumptions” must be met. Dependency needs must be assuaged by a competent leader, who in essence acted as a reassuring, surrogate parent. Safety concerns—the quelling of fears like rejection—also were required so as to avoid “fight or flight” responses. Finally, the leader must not be so domineering as to hinder smaller alliances. Groups that met those three conditions avoided squabbling, schisms, and scapegoating.
Bion believed that the psychological makeup of the leader was important, an insight that other analysts have focused on, none more astutely than Otto Kernberg. This pioneer studied how grandiose, easily enraged, and secretly shame-ridden narcissists captivated their followers. For Kernberg, normal members of a dysfunctional group might regress, temporarily transformed by this figurehead’s malignant coping devices. Similar theories were tested by Vamik Volkan, whose extensive field research showed how such leaders engendered a childlike regression. Never sorry, always sure, they encouraged their followers to fall into line and see the world through their eyes. A world made of the all-good-us and the all-bad-them could be thereby conjured up, and reinforced through ritualized acts of remembrance. An ethnic or religious or national group’s “chosen glories” and “chosen traumas” filtered through families, schools, and houses of religion to become simply “who we are.” The many now reacted as one. Otherwise insignificant differences with one’s rivals became essential. Morality became absolute. Reasoning turned magical. Members would do whatever it took to safeguard their group.
Finally, in the wake of Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, and Foucault, the cultural and political ramifications of discourses on the Other have been explored by two generations of scholars. They have interrogated literature and art, questioning the canon and its received truths. Through genealogies that uncover hidden exercises of power, they have reconsidered pedagogy, the social sciences, law, and medicine. Exclusionary sexual and gender norms have been challenged by, among others, Judith Butler. The influential Palestinian-American critic Edward Said explored the way in which Western constructions of the nineteenth-century Oriental created phantasms that still directed thought and belief. Bustling new disciplines arose to focus on gender and postcolonial representations and their power.
This aerial map of more recent work is far from complete. And its brevity may offend those who have devoted themselves to one aspect of this work. That is not my intent. Rather, these sketches are merely meant to illuminate a matter only observed from afar, which is this: if we had hoped for a unified theory to help us name, decode, and defuse the different kinds of xenophobia described in this history, we remain disappointed. No single approach has vanquished the others. In fact, if we peer closer, we see why these varied methods of inquiry might prefer to remain siloed. For otherwise, each runs into devilish trouble.
Behaviorism fits well with animal studies, but it can’t make sense of the way ideas and identities work. Neuro-behaviorists also can’t explain why habituation and exposure do not eliminate entrenched bigotry in those who have never been traumatized. Cognitive scientists run into a wall when they try to account for disdain toward strangers that is more than a rigid thought. What can make these notions highly valued, even cherished aspects of the self? As for psychoanalysis, can this model really account for the way whole nations might take up hatred? Has everyone become neurotic at once? Similarly, why do a good number of such projection-ridden self-haters, by simple education and habituation, free themselves of such bias? And finally, the complex disciplines that emerged to unearth exercises of power toward the Other hold a glaring simplicity. Is their denominator, the “I,” truly indivisible? Are the myriad processes of identity, intention, and recognition really accessible through the “I”’s phenomenal experience? Is there really even a superordinate, causal thing called the “I”? And if there isn’t, if that is all a language game, what does that mean for the “Other”?
Given the complexity of fully explaining any mental phenomenon, much less one as complex as xenophobia, it is not surprising to find such incongruities. Hidden from sight, mental life is too undetermined by empirical facts to live and die by a commitment to scientific falsifiability, and it is too important to simply abandon. Mental life thus beggars any desire for certainty and simplicity. Once we enter its maze, we must make do with scattered data points that, at best, can be gathered up into imperfect explanatory models.
Nearly a century of often brilliant study has now bequeathed us a rich collection of such findings and theories on stranger hatred. Can they be tentatively pulled together? If so, what would be the shared object of so many, seemingly disparate observations and accounts? Would it be conditioned reflexes, stereotypes, prejudice, in-group bias, projection, narcissistic groups, the Other, ethnocentrism, ultranationalism, racism, misogyny, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, or Islamophobia? Is there any one term specific enough to not be meaningless, while broad enough to allow us to consider whatever common strands exist between these phenomena?
Xenophobia, I propose, is such a word. By recovering its rich past, encompassing far more than an animus against immigrants, and by examining the numerous concepts of stranger hatred to which it is linked, we may repurpose this term so that it serves to organize and promote attempts at synthesis. Multiple root systems, the same tree.
This reframing would force disparate viewpoints of stranger fear and hatred into conversation. That could lead to more nuanced models and more effective policies. While we must continue to study the historical specifics of, for example, racism or sexism, we now also could consider their common manifestations and shared causes. Hence, we might resist inadvertently slipping into Frantz Fanon’s depressing cascade, his recognition that the hatred of Others flowed from the Frenchman toward the Jew, from the Jew to the Arab, from the Arab to the Black, then backwards and on.
To pursue such a synthesis, let’s start with what xenophobia is not. It cannot be reduced to some genetic defect or neural pathology. Xenophobia is not hardwired in some subset of the human population. If only. Hannah Arendt and, more recently, Sander Gilman and James Thomas have demonstrated that while it would be comforting to think of virulent racists as insane, that would only defame the mentally ill. Normal specimens of our biologic kind commit most hate crimes; they pulled the switches at Auschwitz. While toxic leaders may be ill, xenophobia is not literally an illness. More disturbingly, it is a part of the psychic violence of everyday life.
Nor is xenophobia the direct product of economic distress. Ever since Adam Smith, economists have argued that foreigners were targeted due to justifiable concerns regarding their threat to local livelihoods. Surely rational economic actors should not be called “xenophobic” for merely defending their turf. However, research has demonstrated that throughout the twentieth century, regions swept up by xenophobia have not shown decreased wages or increased unemployment. Most xenophobes have not emerged solely, or even mostly, from a threatened labor pool. And history has amply demonstrated that the identity of the foreign workers, not just their economic threat, played a role in these outbreaks. Finally, what to do with the inconvenient but recurrent fact that outbursts of xenophobia often first emerge in desolate settings, where there has been little economic competition from foreigners, because there were almost no foreigners? While economic pressures like increased poverty or loss of work lead to helplessness and despair, and therefore may be contributing factors to xenophobic outbreaks, they do not always do so.
Similarly, xenophobia cannot be reduced to a straightforward desire for cultural preservation. Patriotism, traditionalism, and conservativism, that argument goes, have been unfairly labeled as an irrational rejection of foreigners. Societies that consider themselves homogenous—a stance that, as Renan pointed out, always required a great deal of amnesia—upon encountering foreigners, may reject heterogeneity. Tribes resist change and hold on to their traditions. Was the Navajo Nation “xenophobic” for seeking to preserve its language from American attempts to extirpate it? Hardly.
Like that sixteenth-century debate in Spain over whether the Aztecs were obliged to welcome “visitors” like Cortés, this challenge hinges on one factor: power. Can we fairly weigh discrepancies between the hosts and their outsiders? Can we distinguish those who come with arms, wealth, and a foreign state behind them, those who stride forth as conquerors, from those who arrive with no such desire or advantages? When is the cultural threat from the strangers supported by such facts, and when is it symbolic? For while shifts in populations may correlate with some manifestations of xenophobia, these migrations do not always result in the vilifying of the strangers. Far from it. Something else is required.
What then causes xenophobia? This history suggests tentative answers that pull from domains like philosophy, psychology, and sociology. While purists from those disciplines may protest, let us first divide this question and distinguish between Other anxiety, overt xenophobia, and covert xenophobia.
Other anxiety is known to us all. It is an ontological state of being. Humans can’t read each other’s minds or easily fathom each other’s intentions. We must rely on analogies to our own minds, and clues from appearance, behavior, and communication. Upon meeting a stranger, we thus become embroiled in a mystery. Who is the foreigner from Elea to whom Socrates posed his queries? What’s with the fellow with no valise who boarded the ship in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man? “Whodunit” mysteries offer the vicarious pleasure of experiencing a touch of that anxiety and, in the end, resolving it. Ritualized forms of greetings and pleasantries like those attached to the Greek rules of xenia function to diminish some of that uncertainty. Still, as many children’s tales remind us, the wolf at our door may come in peace, but he may be sporting that grin because he just spotted his next meal.
The cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman explored ways we may have evolved to master Other anxiety. For survival, humans developed associative, unconscious assessments that take a stab at the truth, what he called “System 1” thought. These shortcuts, he experimentally demonstrated, sprint ahead of deliberate decision making. “Fast thinking” allows us to instantly read anger on another’s face. We immediately finish sentences like: “Thieves are usually …” Whatever once led to such an association has long been forgotten. As with Joseph LeDoux’s amygdala-based threat reactions, there may be no conscious experience of fear. Rather, this reaction is nonconscious, automatic, lifesaving, and too often wrong.
Stereotypes, for Kahneman and many cognitive scientists, are simply the stuff of fast thinking. This, unfortunately, can lead to a confusion of tongues, since categorizing a chair, for example, surely must be distinguished from motivated negative portrayals of, say, Asians or lesbians. The difference emerges when we recall that System 1 reactions, as associative links, are forged in a social world. Hence, they may be false associations, displacements that, like the ones drilled into the minds of Pavlov’s dogs, we learn and live by. G. Stanley Hall’s questionnaire featured Blacks as the most feared American stranger. How did they come to be so chosen? How did certain strangers and outsiders become swiftly seen, known, and denigrated while others did not? As any targeted minority knows, therein lies a sea of assumptions in which one might easily drown.
Other anxiety, in theory, can be managed. The behaviorists’ cure of exposure and habituation can be put to work to diminish such conditioned reflexes through social mixing and integration. Unconscious biases can be reworked through relearning. Workplace sensitivity training often rests on this premise. Dialogue with the Other can restore the capacity for empathy and the possibility of mutual recognition. In one encouraging study, California canvassers found that by simple fifteen-minute discussions, they were able to significantly reduce prejudice against trans-gender people in ten percent of their subjects. If the hosts and strangers work, play, and love together, the psychic processes that drive conditioned threat reactions and unconscious bias can diminish. We learn to tolerate an initial discomfort, take in new information, refine our appraisals, and go beyond categorical judgments as our slower, conscious capacities for judgment kick in.
For this to occur, we must be challenged. Online tools may help us encounter our own “implicit biases,” but the Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde put the task best: “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch the terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.”
That alone, sadly, may not be enough. Kahneman found little evidence to support an individual’s capacity to rein in his or her own stereotypes, and pointed us to thought “factories,” those entities that help manufacture opinion. Institutions and media play important roles in furthering or, conversely, displacing bigoted stereotypes. What credos can keep us alert to Other anxiety and its destructive effects? For Saint Paul and Las Casas, the Christian Church served this purpose: we are all God’s children, the Bible taught. For Diderot and post-Enlightenment secularists, it was the democratic nation, based on the self-evident truth of human equality and the requirement for toleration. For those shocked into action by the Holocaust, it was a commitment to international human rights and a redoubling of efforts to dismantle racial, religious, and sexual hierarchies.
Other anxiety should be distinguished from overt xenophobia, in which fear and hatred of the Other has solidified into more than an errant anxiety or a cognitive error. Here, it has become a defended solution. Overt xenophobes need their villain; they hate the xénos so as to stabilize themselves.
Xenophobia, like Other anxiety, is marked by stereotypes, but these are more rigid. They do not easily alter, for the focus on the degraded Other as bad, defective, or immoral is desired. In this way, the world has been simplified and purified: we are good and they are bad. The reliance on defensive projection can be discerned by three tell-tale signs: a vanishing capacity to consider “the gray zones,” an inability to tolerate affective ambivalence, and the loss of a capacity for guilt. The xenophobic are always justified, always the victims, even after perpetrating violence. External condemnation falls on deaf ears. In-between arguments are swept aside as weak. Shaming the offender only provokes rage.
Sadism is prominent in overt xenophobia. There is pleasure, as Sartre and others reminded us, in the “I”’s domination of the Other. Psychoanalysts, however, considered this to be motivated by self-hatred. Defensive projection makes the need to control the Other never-ending. The evil out there must be constantly reasserted, or those same attributes might find their way back to their rightful owner. Xenophobia therefore can seem, in a descriptive not a clinical sense, to be both paranoid and obsessional. Its repetitive function is to cleanse the xenophobe of his own self-loathing by constantly soiling the devalued Other.
Groups, by definition, share common notions of the not-us, those that lie outside our boundaries, but these exclusionary criteria are usually not also the collective’s only core commitments, its raison d’être. For xenophobic groups, however, that is precisely the case. Their rigid borders, defined by diminished Others, give both definition to members and provide the main purpose for the group. To allow the xénos passage in, then, poses an existential threat to this community.
Xenophobic groups, over the last century, seem to have emerged as a symptom of broader social failures, in which, for example, affiliative bonds in a nation-state weaken. Joining a xenophobic group thereby may become a solution. However, a price must be paid upon entry: these communities demand ideological purity. Dissent brings with it the risk of being wrong, that is, being shamed (again) oneself. Meanwhile, leaders encourage regressive submission by offering relief of internal conflict; they take up the role of group conscience. Members are then lifted up on two fronts: they are identified with the Great One, and they are distinct from the denigrated stranger.
If the social conditions are right, xenophobic groups can grow quickly. Their divisiveness and demagoguery may encourage those who may possess run-of-the-mill Other anxiety to adopt harsher beliefs, as a solution to their own isolation, helplessness, and weakness. We are not the scared and debased; they are. Charismatic leaders masterfully play on these emotions, because they too often dance around the fires of shame themselves. As Adorno showed, authoritarian families, societies, and political parties all engender fears of humiliation and offer relief through a regressive dependence on an idealized leader. Those red faces shouting in the crowd are ecstatic for being so accepted; they are determined to never be cast out, to never be strangers themselves.
Unfortunately, the ameliorative efforts that quell Other anxiety will fail here. As numerous studies reveal, diversity training and sensitivity classes often do not have the hoped-for effect. Exposure and habituation with this population go nowhere. Cognitive models—what Kurt Lewin called “re-education”—don’t stick either, not among those who belong to groups that reinforce an obligatory commitment to hate them. Bigots switch the station from television programs that humanize their demons; they don’t care if the Iraqis had anything to do with 9/11. That policeman is not just jumpy; he is quick to shoot a Black motorist because he knows that’s one of the “bad guys.”
What to do? For those who take the long view, the path leads back to the family. The greatest ally of the hyper-intellectual Freudo-Marxists, ironically enough, was that homespun purveyor of homilies, Dr. Benjamin Spock. Schooled in psychoanalytic theory, Spock’s immensely popular parenting guides called for less harsh, shame-driven forms of child-rearing. Social groups that mirror these forms of self-regulation may also be less prone to authoritarian solutions.
When overt xenophobia has emerged, what is to be done? How may we confront vilifying groups without vilification, not merely out of some lofty virtue but because otherwise it won’t work. To shame the already shamed only heightens their defenses. And, yet, to coddle xenophobes or retreat from their accusatory polemics only makes their cause and their aggression grow stronger.
If reeducation and exposure here do nothing, if this is not strictly a matter of economics or cultural preservation as I have argued, then the guiding principle for amelioration must focus on matters of identity. In my view, as an ethical absolute and a political guiding force, radical egalitarianism poses the greatest threat to xenophobia. That rudder will help opponents steer clear of the temptation to demonize the demonizers, and transform into their doubles. Alongside that view of equality and basic human rights, I agree with Joshua Greene, who argued that toleration should not be seen as solely a liberal value, but rather a rule for all, a “meta-morality.” We therefore confront bigotry while offering acceptance to all, except those who, as Karl Popper argued, would destroy toleration. Over time, such constancy may attract those who have lost their taste for submission, or have grown tired of the turbulent drama that comes with maintaining fantasies of a world so divided. Meanwhile, legal protections must be robust in their defense of the victims of these projections.
Finally, consider covert xenophobia. This form of discrimination operates in the shadows. It deploys the “dividing strategies” that Michel Foucault illuminated, and it does so freely. The battles, if ever fought with the Other, have been long won. The victor can be naturalized, the vanquished, too. These discriminatory rules seem just like the way “we” prefer to do things. In this way, highly socialized and accepted forms of xenophobia disappear into norms, conventions, and discourses.
Unlike cognitive notions of implicit bias, these forms of discriminations are not mere associative errors; they are quietly motivated. Those desires may be disavowed, but they make themselves known as a resistance to change. Unfair? Devaluing? When so accused, counter-forces kick up, baffling those cognitive scientists who would teach away all implicit bias. For example, my medical school was hardly alone in having a quota for Jews some fifty years ago; admitting too many Jews just wasn’t a good idea, the leaders agreed. However, when pressed a little, when lectured about the evils of bias, they did not amend their ways. After a cognac at the club, if asked to defend this rule, the deans might become shockingly overt about why too many Jews was not a good idea. Mostly, they did not need to explain.
Covert xenophobia operates then at the level of individuals as well as institutions, organizations, and social structures. However, no individual—it would seem—need take responsibility. Rule-based dictums inscribe hierarchies, logical relations, and differentials, all of which support discrimination against the degraded group. These ways of thought create, protect, and enforce power. Foucault’s followers have sought to pry open how Western discourses and institutions hid these effects and redefined them as benevolence. The marginalized of a social order thus take their place in a series of legal, medical, bureaucratic, and institutional matrices that define and limit them. The machinations of covert xenophobia quietly purr along, then they may come to light due to an egregious crisis or scandal. Only when looking through the wreckage do these structural forms of discrimination become clear.
THIS OUTLINE IS but one attempt to synthesize a century of efforts from a number of disciplines. It is my hope that it will be replaced by others that employ more data and yield more explanatory power. In the end, I insist on only one thing. The Balkanization of stranger fear and hatred into many moral, political, historical, psychic, and social entities has blinded us to their possible commonalities. In addition to specialized working vocabularies, and the instructive histories of distinct, maligned communities, we need an overarching concept that organizes our thinking about similarities.
Others have made the same point. The psychologist Gordon Allport pulled many biases into his notion of “prejudice,” but his effort, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl deftly showed, led to overgeneralizations and obfuscations. She herself sought to rehabilitate Allport’s term by dividing up kinds of prejudice between three psychoanalytic character types, an ambitious effort that was so specific, and so unsupported empirically, that it collapsed under its own weight. The closest proposal to my own came from Albert Memmi. The author of The Colonizer and the Colonized had experienced what it was like to be the object of anti-Arab, anti-Semitic, and anti-French vitriol. He understood the need for a broadly encompassing term that linked such hatreds together. In 1982, Memmi proposed to call it “heterophobia,” a fear of the dissimilar, which led to forms of “domination based on real or imagined differences.” His logic was impeccable, but Memmi’s coinage never caught on. Perhaps at that historical moment, the whole matter, like xenophobia itself, seemed rather academic.