Xenophobia

“ The European Union's Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia has declared in the past that anti-Semitism in the country was typically characterized by diffuse and traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes rather than by acts of physical aggression. ”

“ Condemning Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The Federal Government has a responsibility to prevent racism, xenophobia, and intolerance against everyone in America, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. ”

“ Thus the hatred and despising of human beings from whom Europe wishes to extort her luxuries has led to such jealousy and bickering between European nations that they have fallen afoul of each other and have fought like crazed beasts. Such is the fruit of human hatred.
But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to this world. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese they form two-thirds of the population of the world. A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. ”

“ Exiles will widen our domains. Brother, you shall have America!" said he to the Hindoo, with an inspired air. "Brother, you shall have Africa!" said he to the negro. "Brothers, I will take Europe! Wherever men are to be found, there must be oppressors and victims—wherever there are victims, there must be hearts swollen with hate—it is for us to inflame that hate with all the ardor of vengeance! It is for us, servants of Bowanee, to draw towards us, by seducing wiles, all whose zeal, courage, and audacity may be useful to the cause. Let us rival each other in devotion and sacrifices ”

“ The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. ”

“ Discontent appears and social friction is intensified, not only because occasions for it grow more frequent, but because the temper of each race is more angry and suspicious. These phenomena, present even where the races are not very diverse in habits of life or level of culture, as is the case with Greeks, Armenians, and Turks in various parts of the East, or with Moors and Jews in Morocco, may become of graver import as between races so far apart as whites and negroes in the Gulf States of North America, or whites and Malays in the Philippine Isles, or Europeans and native fellahin in Egypt. ”

“ But while the problems growing out of European immigration have of recent years troubled us most, they do not constitute our greatest race problem. Always in the background of our consciousness, like a volcano quiescent but very much alive, looms our gigantic negro problem—the problem which for the sins of our slave-importing and slave-holding forefathers we inherit, and from which, according to our characteristic way of "meeting" great quiescent problems, we are always endeavouring to hide. ”

“ It plainly shows us, to our horror, what human hearts are capable of when racial hatred and blind raving passion win the upper hand, drowning the voice of justice, mercy and goodness. Can we Swiss suppose that we are immune against such frenzy? But are not the same dark powers active within our own people, openly at times and sometimes secretly, confusing conscience; stirring passions; igniting racial hatred? ”

“ But the feeling soon wears off, and one moves among them with perfect indifference, treating them, not as dogs, because in that case one would whistle to them and pat them, but as machines with which one can have no communion or sympathy. Of course those who can speak the language are somewhat more en rapport with the natives, but very slightly so, I take it. When the passions of fear and hatred are engrafted on this indifference, the result is frightful; an absolute callousness as to the sufferings of the objects of those passions, which must be witnessed to be understood and believed. ”

“ From the inferior value set on human life by the races of the East, we accuse them of barbarity: forgetting, that, owing to the absence of all analogy between our origin, races, and education, we are incompetent to appreciate their feelings, and the motives of their conduct, and have consequently no right to condemn them. If we abstain from taking our neighbour's life, we set also a proportionate value on our own: a native of the East displays, it is true, less veneration for his own species. ”

“ In other words, men who are intellectually and morally blind are violently removed from light effulgent into thick darkness, in order that they may obtain light themselves and diffuse light among others! Ignorance is sent to instruct ignorance, ungodliness to exhort ungodliness, vice to stop the progress of vice, and depravity to reform depravity! All that is abhorrent to our moral sense, or dangerous to our quietude, or villanous in human nature, we benevolently disgorge upon Africa for her temporal and eternal welfare! ”

“ Your people were running about in the woods, naked, eating raw meat, eternally at war—tribe with tribe—steeped in ignorance, vice and superstition, with an occasional lapse into human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Your race, as a race, is free now in Africa, as it has been since the dawn of history:—where is the civilization which it worked out for itself? It does not exist ”

“ I have watched the development of this prejudice against the Japanese, even as I am most anxiously watching it grow against certain European{196} groups which are ethnically more or less differentiated from the native population, and I am not over confident that we shall solve the ethnic problem without much struggle and stress and strain. Indeed, the ethnic problem can be solved only if we have patience, a measure of sympathy and the sense of justice. ”

“ And yet, given the dizzying pace of globalization, and the cultural leveling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities -- their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict. ”

“ Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty? ”

“ This is what white men mean by civilization, disguise it how they may. This struggle is a conflict of wills and interests among the various nations which make up the white race, to determine whose will shall be accepted as the collective will of the white race; to decide, at least for this century, who shall be the inheritors of the lands of Africa and Asia and dictators of the lives and destinies of their colored inhabitants. ”

“ And which would you ruther have, the black shadow growin’ deeper and deeper every year on this continent, and sectional hatred and race prejudice, and fear, and distrust, and jealousy, and alarm, and a constant variance all the time, onrest, and despair, and helplessness—which would you ruther have, them cruel spirits to camp down by you for good, and a growin’ worse all the time, or to make a big effort and heave the load off for good, and clear the air of all the bad atmosphere of internal and inevitable war, and let Peace settle down on this onhappy land agin? ”

“ Future generations will wonder at the process and will say: “A new gigantic race was being born between the Atlantic and the Pacific; a race born to build or to destroy, to cry to the world, ‘Ground Arms,’ or cast it into the hell of war; a race in which are welded all kindreds of the people of the earth, or a race which will destroy itself by mutual hate.” ”

“ Teach the colored girl about prejudice. Parents should read up the World's history of persecution and note the accounts of race and religious persecution in England, France, Germany, Russia, Turkey and Spain. Even today there is English hatred of the East Indian, Russian persecution of the Jew, and Turkish persecution of the Armenians. Then, too, Europeans are only just beginning to regard the Oriental nations as human beings. Prejudice is hard to explain and hard to conquer. It has taken generations in other instances and the world has always kicked the under dog. ”

“ He is not willing that all your knowledge of the race that formerly possessed this continent should come from the lips of strangers and enemies, or that you should think of them as blood-thirsty and treacherous, as savage and unclean. ”

“ So long as your blood relationship to Africa is apparent to you the world has a redeeming force specially equipped for the work of the uplift of that continent.
"Again, a seer linked to us by ties of blood, foreshadows that the paramount problem of our century will be the problem of the adjustment of the white to the darker races. If we disappear as a dark race this world problem must look elsewhere for special advocates. It seems to me that our situation is from every point of view eloquent with the voice of destiny. ”

“ We dislike those who threaten our happiness partly because we fear them. And we fear, as was pointed out in more detail in the discussion of that powerful human trait, the unfamiliar, the strange, the startling, the unexpected. The facility with which sensational newspapers can work up in an ignorant population a hate for foreign nations, especially those of a totally alien civilization, is made possible by the fear which these uninformed readers can feel at the dangerous possibilities of mysterious foreign hordes. ”

“ Can it be that a higher civilization bears within itself something which is incompatible with the existence of inferior races? Do the dominion exercised by the stranger, the invasion of the land, and the violence done to religion and customs inspire these men, once so free and proud, with such despair that they refuse to have any posterity? ”

“ If Europeans have duties towards the Coloured people, what else is implied than the need for humane dealings, and endeavours to ameliorate their lot, and uplift them in the scale of civilization. If that is what their duties mean, let us ask how far they have fulfilled them.
Instead of kindly, humane treatment, we find barbarous cruelty and inhumanity. Instead of ameliorating our lot they endeavour to accentuate its bitterness. Instead of aiming at our upliftment they seek to degrade us. ”

“ The curiously tenacious hold that Anglophobia has on a certain class of our people—might it not be worth your while to make, at some convenient time and in some natural way, a direct attack on it—in a letter to someone, which could be published, or in some address, or possibly in a statement to a Senate committee, which could be given to the press? Say how big and strong and sure-of-the-future we are; so big that we envy nobody, and that those who have Anglophobia or any Europe-phobia are the only persons who "truckle" to any foreign folk or power ”

“ It was fear that he was instilling into them—fear of the determined white man, fear of the white man's lash, fear of the white man's power of revenge that could come with an ear-splitting shriek and explosion from a war-ship. ”

“ Cut off from all intercourse with civilised nations, and boasting an advantage over the negroes, by possessing, though in a very limited degree, the knowledge of letters, they are at once the vainest and proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted, ferocious, and intolerant of all the nations on the earth—combining in their character the blind superstition of the negro with the savage cruelty and treachery of the Arab. ”

“ In short, there is no war of races in Europe; for in every single nationality concerned in the present struggle the various elements of the European population are represented, and arrayed against the same elements as grouped together in another nationality. The conflict has nothing whatever to do with racial descent. The so-called racial antipathies are feelings that have grown up on another basis and have been given a fictitious racial interpretation. ”

“ Certainly, when we hear the cry of "America for the Americans," and "Italy for the Italians,"—when we observe the heaving of the various dislocated tribes of Sclaves for union, and when we painfully witness the disappearance of races,—we are conscious of being on the verge of an ethnic crisis. ”

“ Already, therefore, it is possible without intellectual dishonesty to look forward to a future for the race which need not be reached through a welter of blood and hatred. We can imagine the nations settling the racial allocation of the temperate or tropical breeding-grounds, or even deliberately placing the males and females of the few hopelessly backward tribes on different islands, without the necessity that the most violent passions of mankind should be stimulated in preparation for a general war. ”

“ Whithersoever we turn, the laws of custom, which have governed the uncivilized races for count [Pg ix] less generations, are breaking down; the old isolation which kept their blood pure is vanishing before railway and steamship communication which imports alien labourers to work for European settlers; and ethnologists of the future, having no pure race left to examine, will have to fall back upon hearsay evidence in studying the history of human institutions. ”

“ The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society—prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself, can subdue—mark the people of color, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society ”

“ By the acts and operations of wicked men, shielded under a cloak of religion, we the people of color are doomed to all the miseries that the human body is able to sustain—deprived of light, knowledge and social intercourse, by the colonization gentlemen. ”