Xenophobia

Xenophobia is one of the key drivers of marginalisation, discrimination, and conflict, yet many prominent machine learning fairness frameworks fail to comprehensively measure or mitigate the resulting xenophobic harms. Here we aim to bridge this conceptual gap and help facilitate safe and ethical design of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. We ground our analysis of the impact of xenophobia by first identifying distinct types of xenophobic harms, and then applying this framework across a number of prominent AI application domains, reviewing the (...) potential interplay between AI and xenophobia on social media and recommendation systems, healthcare, immigration, employment, as well as biases in large pre-trained models. These help inform our recommendations towards an inclusive, xenophilic design of future AI systems. (shrink)

Book review of Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, and István Bibó: _Antisemitismin kirous: kolme kriittistä esseetä_. Translated by Anssi Halmesvirta and Tuomas Laine-Frigren. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2023.

There are two competing ways of understanding nefarious expressions of nationalism in countries like the U.S., either as xenophobia or racism. In this essay, I offer a way of capturing what is attractive in both accounts: a way of thinking about the xenophobia of U.S. nationalism that does not miss or minimize the role that race plays in condemning such expressions, but at the same time does not risk overextending the definition of racism. To do this, the essay makes a (...) case for decoupling and slightly revising the meaning of the terms “racialization” and “racial formation” while also proposing a third term, “racial disintegration.” In doing so, we find that the xenophobia directed at certain pan-racial groups, at least in places like the U.S., promotes a unique brand of White supremacy and does so in ways that maintain or reshape the nation's understanding of race and specifically its racial categories. (shrink)

I claim that hate speech is actually antithetical to free speech. Nevertheless, this claim invokes the misconception that one would be jeopardizing free speech due to a phenomenon known as "false polarization" – a “tendency for disputants to overestimate the extent to which they disagree about whatever contested question is at hand.” The real polarity does not lie between hate speech (as protected free speech) vs. censorship. Rather, hate speech is censorship. It is the censorship of entire sectors of the (...) population, a violation of their right to be heard, and at worse, an incitement to their extinction. The liberal attempt to try to fit the metaphorical 'round peg' of hate speech into the 'square hole' of free speech is impossible without revealing one’s reluctance to endow people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, women, and other socially oppressed/marginalized groups as equal and deserving of full human dignity. I start by providing a clear definition of "hate speech" (which is lacking in legislation); then I review the original and alleged political intent of the "freedom of expression" within US history; and finally I illuminate the very material consequences of hate speech. (shrink)

This chapter delves into the examination of racist discourse in Japan and the process of problematizing it to elucidate the nuances of human rights and discrimination within Japanese society. Since the mid-2000s, explicit manifestations of racism have occurred on the streets of major Japanese cities. A series of counter-hate movements, initiated by both Japanese and Koreans, have heightened awareness regarding hate speech in society and successfully influenced the enactment of the Act on Promotion of Efforts to Eliminate Unjustifiable Discriminatory Speech (...) and Behavior against Persons of Non-Japanese Nationality in 2013. Nevertheless, despite the ongoing discussions surrounding the so-called “Japanese-style xenophobia” that have spurred broad support for regulating racist discourse in Japan, this very concept can potentially obscure the intricate and multifaceted dynamics of racism and nationalism, resulting in the continued limitation of human rights for foreign residents. (shrink)

Scholarship on Pentecostal potential and practice forms a significant part of the debate on religion and development, not least when the focus is on sub-Saharan Africa. Yet in this debate African Pentecostal migrant communities have scarcely been represented. The article focuses on two such communities in South Africa, arguing that they may be regarded as developmental agents in the context of racialized xenophobia, even if they do not portray themselves as such. The argument is based on ethnographic fieldwork and shaped (...) through employing the concept of transformational development that centers on restoring relationships. The article concludes that the two communities – living in a context affected by racialized xenophobia – contribute meaningfully towards restoring relationships between people and God, one's relationship with oneself, relationships within the church community as well as relationships between the church community and the neighborhood. (shrink)

In their article, “Immigrant legalization: A Dilemma Between Justice and The Rule of Law,” Sarah Song and Irene Bloemraad address rule of law objections to policies that would regularize the status of undocumented immigrants in the United States. On their view, justice requires that liberal democratic states (i.e., states that are committed to individual liberty and universal equality) provide pathways for undocumented immigrants to regularize their status. We do not disagree with Song and Bloemraad’s account: rule of law and regularization (...) policies are not inconsistent, and in fact regularization supports rule of law, when properly understood. Our view is that there needs to be a deeper investigation into the motivations of “rule of law” objections considered in Song and Bloemraad’s account. We argue that the real purpose of these objections is not necessarily to serve as an alternative to the justice-based claims of undocumented immigrants, but as a way to undermine them. On our account, these rule of law objections accomplish this undermining task through the mechanisms of dog whistling, discrediting and distorting, and ostracizing. (shrink)

Multicultural societies are faced with the problem of xenophobia – the fear, dislike, and discrimination against strangers. Xenophobia has its root in the ontology of ‘the self’ and ‘the other’, where ‘the self’” is ‘the indigenes’ and ‘the other,’ ‘the strangers’, who must be denied the privileges and rights of the indigenes and the opportunity to contribute towards the development of their societies. In this paper, I employ conversational thinking – a method and philosophy grounded in the sub-Saharan African notion (...) of ‘relationship’ as a viable theoretical option that can help us live beyond the problem of xenophobia. In conversational thinking, there are two ontological and epistemic agents, nwa-nsa and nwa-nju, involved in an arumaristic relationship at an ontological point, nwa-izugbe. I ground my argument in this ‘arumaristic relationship’ which allows for nwa-nsa taken as ‘the self’ and nwa-nju, ‘the other’ to come to the realm of nwa-izugbe, and exhibit nmeko. I contend that the notion ‘nmeko’, emphasized in conversational thinking, is key to putting xenophobia in the past since it stresses ‘arumaristic complementary relationship’ irrespective of socio-cultural and racial differences among people. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine how bordered reality is being imposed and resisted in the context of where we are placed right now, 'Greece'. Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. We approach this process methodologically from (...) the situated angle of the embodiment of resistance in the concrete experiences of people (including the researchers ourselves), whose narratives reveal the distracted spatial coordinates of the 'hotspot regime', which becomes a traveling control device. Rather than approaching the hotspots on the five Greek border islands as geographically fixed entities we introduce the concept of the mobile hotspot to show how the logic of the hotspot suffuses the uneven geographies of a bordered reality. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to critically explore the density, tensions, and conflict-ridden nature of movements within, around, and against the hotspots. (shrink)

This article aims to examine how the concept of Imago Dei can serve as a symbol for the broadly understood idea of religious inclusion and human dignity. The article explores the concept of Imago Dei primarily from a protological perspective, analyzing its usage in biblical writings, theological tradition and modern philosophy. The substantial, relational and functional—which three usages of the concept can be found in the inclusive theology of Gregory of Nyssa—are analyzed in this article. Arguably, in the context of (...) religious inclusion, the rela­tional angle of Imago Dei seems to be the most important. Similarly contemporary Protestant theologian, Jürgen Moltmann states in his book, God in the Creation, that the “relational” concept of Imago Dei underscores the fundamental dignity of every person. In his book, God for Secular Society, Moltmann states that properly understood human rights should include democratic relationships between people, cooperation between societies, concern for the environment in which people live, and responsibility for future generations. From these perspectives, the concept of Imago Dei can be utilized as a symbol indicating the dignity of every person and human community, but also a symbol against any types of racism, nationalism or xenophobia. (shrink)

Democracy is often used as shorthand for liberal democracy. Despite such casual conflation, the two concepts remain importantly distinct. I argue that democracy unfettered by the constraints of liberal institutions and commitments gives rise to the proliferation of disinformation and to xenophobic populism. I draw upon Plato and the democracy of ancient Athens to illustrate the history of association between disinformation and democracy. Moving on to our more contemporary treatments of liberalism, specifically to the ideal theory of John Rawls, I (...) show that in order to address disinformation and the reactionary politics in which it thrives, we must attend to a robust defense of liberalism against non-liberal and illiberal democracy. (shrink)

Radical generosity and the origins of cosmopolitanism -- Radical generosity as unconditional ethics -- The practice of radical generosity -- The possibility of cosmopolitanism n the realm of political institutions.

In the United States today, much interpersonal racism is driven by corrupt forms of self-preservation. Drawing from Jean- Jacques Rousseau, I refer to this as self-love racism. The byproduct of socially-induced racial anxieties and perceived threats to one’s physical or social wellbeing, self-love racism is the protective attachment to the racialized dimensions of one’s social status, wealth, privilege, and/or identity. Examples include police officer related shootings of unarmed Black Americans, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the resurgence of unabashed white supremacy. This form (...) of racism is defined less by the introduction of racism into the world and more on the perpetuation of racially unjust socioeconomic and political structures. My theory, therefore, works at the intersection of the interpersonal and structural by offering an account of moral complacency in racist social structures. My goal is to reorient the directionality of philosophical work on racism by questioning the sense of innocence at the core of white ways-of-being. (shrink)

Different evocations of “crisis” create distinct categories that in turn evoke certain social reactions. Post-2008, Greece became the epicentre of the “financial crisis”; simultaneously, since 2015 with the advent of the “refugee crisis,” it became the “hotspot of Europe.” What are the different vocabularies of crisis? Moreover, how have both representations of crisis facilitated humanitarian crises to become phenomena for European and transnational institutional management? What are the hegemonically constructed subjects of the different crises? The everyday reality in the crisis-ridden (...) hotspot of Europe is invisible in these representations. It is precisely the daily, soft, lived, and unspoken realities of intersecting crises that hegemonic discourses of successive, overlapping, or “nesting crises” render invisible. By shifting the focus from who belongs to which state-devised category to an open-ended, polyvocal account of capitalist oppressions, we aim to question the state’s and supranational efforts to divide the “migrant mob” into discrete juridical categories of citizens (emigrants), refugees, and illegal immigrants, thereby undermining coalitional struggles between precaritised groups. (shrink)

Bashabi Fraser is a poet in her own right. She is also a creative translator. This is a review of her edited volume on the Partition of Bengal. The review highlights our need to read the partition event as a warning for future and ongoing genocides. The review also shows the superiority of literature over history. And finally it has something to say about translation and separately, on P Lal. For instance, this reviewer in many other reviews too insists on (...) the superiority of Fr Mignon SJ over Prof Lal's understanding of translation. (shrink)

The high frequency that the question “where are you from” gets asked in ordinary conversation, as well as the insistence on getting private information from people one hardly knows, reveal an interesting phenomenon: an exceptional reversing of the codes of politeness, where indiscretion becomes the rule while efforts to avoid it become impolite acts. In order to explain this phenomenon, this article compares the hypothesis of racial micro-aggression defended by the existing literature and supported by the results of the French (...) survey Trajectories and Origins, to the hypothesis of methodological nationalism. The article shows that the second hypothesis provides a better explanation of how the “where are you from” question is actually practiced. The article’s thesis is that the importance of the “where are you from” question in ordinary conversations is a measure of the banalization of methodological nationalism. (shrink)

What is at stake in identifying some actions or speech acts as racist as opposed to regarding them as “merely” xenophobic? If we understand racism as a system, how does this impact the way we address the distinction between the terms racism and xenophobia? My attempt to address these questions is guided by two observations drawn from the genealogy of the term racism. First, in the English language, the word was initially a synonym for Nazi anti-Semitism. The strategies to combat (...) racism developed by UNESCO under the influence of Ashley Montagu and other followers of Franz Boas were set by the idea that what had to be opposed was primarily a biologically based racial ideology. However, the attempt to apply this model to the United States was problematized by Oliver Cromwell Cox already in the early 1940s, just as the application of this model to colonialism was opposed by Sartre and Fanon. Secondly, whereas race prejudice had at one time been thought of as natural, as xenophobia still tends to be today, what is called racism in English was from the outset thought of as acquired and blameworthy. As a result of this and other differences, the strategies needed to address racism and xenophobia are fundamentally different. (shrink)

Xenophobia is conceptually distinct from racism. Xenophobia is also distinct from nativism. Furthermore, theories of racism are largely ensconced in nationalized narratives of racism, often influenced by the black-white binary, which obscures xenophobia and shelters it from normative critiques. This paper addresses these claims, arguing for the first and last, and outlining the second. Just as philosophers have recently analyzed the concept of racism, clarifying it and pinpointing why it’s immoral and the extent of its moral harm, so we will (...) analyze xenophobia and offer a pluralist account of xenophobia, with important implications for racism. This analysis is guided by the discussion of racism in recent moral philosophy, social ontology, and research in the psychology of racism and implicit attitudes. (shrink)

What does it mean when calls to reconciliation come from dominant social groups? Whom do these calls address? What effects do they have? I take up these questions through a case study of the public discourse on “reasonable accommodation” in Québec. When the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences concluded its tour of the regions and cities of Québec and, in the spring of 2008, the commissioners (philosopher Charles Taylor and sociologist Gérard Bouchard) issued their report on (...) the state of ethnocultural relations, their titular emphasis was on reconciliation. Their report, "Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation," urged the francophone Québécois majority and immigrant or immigrant-descended cultural and religious minorities in Québec – the two groups between whom the conflict was staged in the discourse of “reasonable accommodation” – each to take its respective responsibility to rebuild Québec interculturalism in the aftermath of its public “crisis.” My case study indicates that when performed by the dominant group, calls to reconciliation can function in a complicated way to reproduce, rather than to transform, existing relations of power. Specifically, in the context of a nation-building project of a white settler society they may bolster, rather than undermine, the social bases of power that characterize such societies. To demonstrate how the discourse of “reasonable accommodation” dissimulates as to its material effects, I invoke Sara Ahmed’s concept of “nonperformativity.”. (shrink)

In her book, The Ethics and Mores of Race, Naomi Zack offers her readers a critical and historical examination of philosophical ethics. This comprehensive and illuminating examination of philosophical ethics concludes by yielding twelve requirements for an ethics of race. While these twelve requirements are not in-themselves an ethics of race, the hope is that these requirements will be sufficient to finally allow us to explicitly engage in ethical treatments of race. My view is that Zack’s argument is basically on (...) solid footing, but that her exposition she does not pay enough attention to the issue of immigration. This is not to say that Zack ignores the issue completely, but to say that, much like the issue of slavery (although very different in many important ways), immigration has historically played an important role in the construction of “whiteness,” in particular in the establishment of “white privilege,” and in the perpetuation of “white supremacy.” So similar to the way slavery is specifically prohibited by requirement 8, I believe that the issue of immigration merits its own specific “requirement of content” within the lager set of requirements for an ethics of race. (shrink)

In "Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?" Donna Gabaccia provides an illuminating account of the origin of the United States' claim to be a "Nation of Immigrants." Gabaccia's endeavor is motivated by the question "What difference does it make if we call someone a foreigner, an immigrant, an emigrant, a migrant, a refugee, an alien, an exile or an illegal or clandestine?" . This question is very important to the immigration debate because, as Gabaccia goes on to show, "[t]o ponder (...) this question is to explore the vastly differing ways that human population movements figure in nation-building and in the historical imagination of nations" . In this paper, I am going to delve deeper into . (shrink)

The science and philosophy of xenophobic behavior.

Most groups have social distance norms that differentiate “us” from “them.” Contrary to a widespread assumption in the sociological literature, however, these normative distinctions, even when they are collectively recognized, do not always overlap with the affective orientations of group members in a uniform manner. Relations between normatively close members of a group are not always warm and friendly, and normatively distant groups can sometimes be an object of reverence and love. In this study, a typology of five different ways (...) in which normatively distant groups can be perceived is presented: as competitors, allies, symbols of otherness, saviors, and ambivalent figures. Each type tends to emerge under certain circumstances and triggers different affective orientations. This typology is not a substitute for a general theory, but it aims to provide preliminary insights for investigating why affective orientations toward normatively distant groups take different forms and, more generally, to motivate further inquiry into the relationships between different dimensions of social distance. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute toward coalitionbuilding by showing that, even if we try tobuild coalition around what might look like ourmost obvious common concern – reducing racism –the dominant discourse of racial politics inthe United States inhibits an understanding ofhow racism operates vis-à-vis Latino/as andAsian Americans, and thus proves more of anobstacle to coalition building than an aid. Theblack/white paradigm, which operates to governracial classifications and racial politics inthe U.S., takes race in the U.S. to consist ofonly two racial (...) groups, Black and White,with others understood in relation to one ofthese categories.I summarize and discuss the strongestcriticisms of the paradigm and then develop twofurther arguments. Together these argumentsshow that continuing to theorize race in theU.S. as operating exclusively through theblack/white paradigm is actuallydisadvantageous for all people of color in theU.S., and in many respects for whites as well(or at least for white union households and thewhite poor). (shrink)

Atran adds a synthesis of much of the literature on folk-biological classification to important new experimental data relevant to long-standing inferences about the structure of folk taxonomies. What we know about such systems is somewhat overstated, and key issues remain unresolved, especially concerning the centrality of “generic species,” the primacy of “general purpose” taxonomies, and domain specificity.

The purpose of this discussion is twofold. First, I want to shed some light on Kant's concept of personhood as rational agency, by situating it in the context of the first Critique's conception of the self as defined by its rational dispositions. I hope to suggest that this concept of personhood cannot be simply grafted onto an essentially Humean conception of the self that is inherently inimical to it, as I believe Rawls, Gewirth, and others have tried to do. Instead (...) I will try to show how deeply embedded this concept of personhood is in Kant's conception of the self as rationally unified consciousness. Second, I want to deploy this embedded concept of personhood as the basis for an analysis of the phenomenon of xenophobia. (shrink)

September 11 will long be associated with unthinkable violence. The sheer magnitude of the terrorist attacks, the visual imagery of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center, and the extensive media attention given to the victims have defined the violence of September 11 in unitary terms. But in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, another form of violence spread across the country: in the days and weeks after September 11, over one thousand bias incidents against Arabs, Muslims, and South (...) Asians were reported. These incidents, including the murders of as many as *1262 nineteen people, assaults of scores of others, vandalism of homes, businesses and places of worship, and verbal harassment of countless individuals, form part of the subterranean history of September 11. While the violence of September 11 itself is largely thought to have been incomprehensible, post-September 11 hate violence is remarkable precisely because it is something we can understand. Although condemned as individual acts of criminality, the phenomenon of hate violence toward Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians is one that appeared to need little explanation; it was accepted as a regrettable, but expected, response to the terrorist attacks. As early as September 12, 2001, major newspapers reported predictions of the violence against these communities. The physical violence exercised upon the bodies of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians has been accompanied by a legal and political violence toward these communities. In the first two years after September 11, the United States has developed a corpus of immigration law and law enforcement policy that by design or effect applies almost exclusively to Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians. These laws operate in tandem with the individual acts of physical violence that have been carried out against these same communities, thereby aiding and abetting hate violence. Taken together, the multiple assaults on the bodies and rights of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians produce a psychological violence as well and reracialize the communities they target as "Muslim-looking" foreigners unworthy of membership in the national polity. Having occurred in a time of national tragedy, and in the wake of a far grander spectacle of violence, it is perhaps inevitable that the hate violence against Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians would receive short shrift in governmental, media, or public attention. This Article attempts to trace a genealogy of the racial violence in the aftermath of September 11, with three purposes in mind: (1) to explicate the mutually reinforcing relationship between individual hate crimes and governmental racial profiling, and the racialization they jointly effect; (2) to explore the psychological motivations for individual hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims, and South *1263 Asians, and how state-sponsored violence against these communities has reflected that psychology; and (3) to illuminate how the interrelationship among different systems of subordination serves to normalize such violence. (shrink)