X is for Xenophobia

“Xenophobia looks like it is becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siècle. What holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in common.” -Eric J. Hobsbawm

xenophobia [(zen-uh-foh-bee-uh, zee-nuh-foh-bee-uh)] An unreasonable fear, distrust, or hatred of strangers, foreigners, or anything perceived as foreign or different.

I’ll have to admit it: ever since S, X had me worried.

I cannot abide the current use of words like xtreme, xpedient, or xclusive, so using that cute device to skirt the difficulty of X wasn’t an option.

I travel a lot, but even so, I definitely don’t have xenodocheionology, unless you’re talking about the Roger Smith Hotel for sentimental reasons or Villa D’Este for the sheer possibility of running into neighbor George Clooney or the Bangkok Oriental because your underwear comes back from the laundry gift-wrapped and folded in a small box. Sometimes, I’ll admit that I’m a xanthippe, but never xylophagous. I don’t exercise in a xystus or use a xyster on a daily basis, nor am I a student of xylomancy, though it sounds intriguing in a woody kind of way: ah, to find my future in wood chips that are strewn in my path. In my earlier years, say when I was in high school which was exactly thirty years ago since I’ll be going in two weeks to my 30^th high school reunion oh dear god will anyone recognize me in this grey hair, I was xanthous. I imagine sometimes that I am a xenagogue and hope that I am xenodochial. My idea of a mighty fine vacation would be to sail with Captain Jack Sparrow on a xebec.

I toyed with xanthophobia, but I quite enjoy the colour yellow (particularly in its ochre incarnation, especially when paired with teal). I’m a fan of dry heat, so xerophobia was out. Having grown up in my father’s barbershop, xyrophobia didn’t suit. Given my penchant for turned wooden bowls and the forests that lie between Forest Grove and Manzanita, Oregon, xylophobia would seem a sad repudiation.

Xenoglossophobia was a good option, given my experience with speaking French, Chinese and Russian.

But my friend Beth Cooper-Zobott emailed right around "U" or "V" to suggest xenophobia, and of course: fear of strangers or foreigners.   

As opposed to xenomania or xenophilia.

So, here goes. X is for xenophobia in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way.

I’m reading Stuart Little to Tess, a few chapters at a time, each sleepy night. It’s an old copy, one of those satisfyingly hardbound old ones that show decades of being opened, again and again, then closed, then opened again. The cover feels smooth to my touch now, linen worn down; it was my book as a child, a treasured one. I loved the line drawings that serve as illustrations of Stuart’s tiny life.

One section has stayed with me over the past few weeks as we explore Stuart’s escapades night by yawny night, a simple little chapter called “Washing Up,” in which Stuart’s trials and tribulations in accomplishing his morning toiletries are outlined for the reader.

Stuart wakes up much earlier than the rest of the family: “He liked the feeling of being the first one stirring; he enjoyed the quiet rooms with the books standing still on the shelves, the pale light coming in through the windows, and the fresh smell of day.” I know the feeling.

To get to the sink, “Stuart had to climb a tiny rope ladder which his father had fixed for him.” Mrs. Little had provided him “with a doll’s size toothbrush, a doll’s size cake of soap, a doll’s size washcloth, and a doll’s comb…He carried these things in his bathrobe pocket, and when he reached the top of the ladder he took them out, laid them neatly in a row, and set about the task of turning the water on. For such a small fellow, turning the water on was quite a problem.”

“I can get up onto the faucet all right,” he explained to his father, “but I can’t seem to turn it on, because I have nothing to brace my feet against.”

“Yes, I know,” his father replied, “that’s the whole trouble.”

Sometimes we need something to brace our feet against, something to push against. Often times, having something to leverage against is a positive thing; giving my bosses something to say “yes” to was always a strategy of mine. So we often need a wall to push against—but often, too often, I fear that the wall we push against is people who are unlike us. We leverage ourselves off of them. Immigrants, for example, groups unindividualized, fueling our burning fear of becoming a translation nation.

All of us humans tell ourselves stories constantly inside our heads and out—and some of them are that Otherness is a big, mean monster, unsafe—that we must push against it—and not in a good way to create momentum for all, but in that way that leverages others for our own gain. We step on others, “Them,” to make “Us” feel better, look good, rise above. Maybe we should move toward “We” instead. Humans create whole languages or frames of meaning: “axis of evil,” “war on terror,” commodifying the wall to push against. “In a society that has lost its values,” my friend David mentioned when we spoke last week, “fear is its only recourse.” I wonder what would happen if we started being for something, not just against things—and not politically, but as human individuals recalculating our ability to move the faucet by framing the process in “for” units, not “fear” units.

I gave blood on Friday at the local Red Cross—if you can, please give as often as you can—and as I rested during the procedure, the letter “X” was dancing in front of me (Note to self—get a life): I started thinking about blood types and the fear that underlies xenophobia, reminding me of the segregation of U.S. blood supplies for troops based on race, and how Nazi theories about blood underpinned the Holocaust. How Dr. Charles Drew, a black man in charge of the Blood for Britain campaign to save troops during World War II and later named director of the first American Red Cross blood bank in New York City, was legally barred from donating his own blood, even though he was instrumental in developing blood plasma processing, storage and transfusion therapy. As Hobsbawn said, “What holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in common.” Blood seems the very definition of what is common to us all, and yet…

Antonio Tabucchi has said that “Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression.” We push against those unable to push back, or those who do not have things—like oil—that we need. Fear, and the ignorance or not-knowing that often creates it, makes bullies of all of us, it seems.

[photos from Misha Gordin]