Guest Editors’ Introduction

Xenophobia, “the fear or hatred of the foreign(er) or strange(r),” has some distinct, categorical presence in most discussions of some other pervasive modes of sociopolitical discrimination, such as sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. Yet that presence is often rendered antique, faded, or overgeneralized, if not entirely invisible. Yet again, if these “xenophobic” sentiments, attitudes, or practices that are vaguely anachronized or naturalized by political discourses do appear to have more currency today, why is that? One could treat xenophobia as some negligible background noise that has been there all along, or one could invert it to a kind of master concept that purportedly unites and explains all or most of the impulses or forms of discriminatory or exclusionary practices. While immediately relevant to the line of inquiry pursued in the articles in this issue, still lost in the standard accounts—including those of the second variety noted, which might appear more robust than the first—are the nuanced specificities and manifestations of xenophobia in the United States and its critical, practical edges: how xenophobia targets specific groups with the assumption or assertion that they do not or cannot have legal-political membership, nor have they ever belonged in some nation-state—this is typically an internal accusation aimed at national-outsiders or auslanders.

The papers presented in this special issue, “Xenophobia and Racism,” set out to articulate the conceptual and contextual significance of xenophobia vis-à-vis that of racism, along with the affective and discursive dynamic between the two. The essays address, from various perspectives, a series of questions key to this inquiry: What is xenophobia? What is its relation to racism? How does contemporary psychological research on prejudice and bias help to conceptualize xenophobia? How does the explication of the meaning of xenophobia and its prominence, or lack thereof, as a conceptual checkpoint at national sites and borders impact debates in the justice or ethics of immigration, and social inclusion more broadly?

Inspired by the contemporary debate on racism in both “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy, also with a view to contributing such philosophical reflections to the wider discursive communities that form around this globally pressing issue today, namely, of the “foreign other,” this project seeks to promote thematically anchored, border-crossing, genre-bending discussions on xenophobia from within and beyond the racism debate in both areas of philosophical discourses in the United States and beyond. With that in mind, we have organized the innovative pieces gathered in this issue into two parts, the first advancing conceptual articulations and historical backgrounds of xenophobia and racism, and the second offering analyses of their sociocultural and political embodiments in the United States today.

Part 1 opens with Robert Bernasconi’s “Where Is Xenophobia in the Fight against Racism?,” in which he argues for ever more vigilant, conceptual distinctions, if not disconnections, between xenophobia and racism, with a view to keeping the institutional structural force of racism critically disclosed; that is, not having it obscured by certain psycho-biologizing languages. To that end, he explores the origin of the term racism in the Nazi anti-Semitic discourse along with its early articulation by UNESCO, which names and condemns biologically based racial ideology. As Bernasconi goes on to note, this framing of racism in terms of biologically focused ideology and not an institutional system met with resistance in the United States and in the French colonies from antiracist intellectuals such as Cox, Sartre, and Fanon, and yet the association of xenophobia with a natural psychological predisposition remains. Thus, the paper warns that “those who want to blur increasingly the difference between the two terms should be on their guard against, perhaps unwittingly, reinforcing the narrow use of the term racism.” In a similar vein, David Haekwon Kim and Ronald R. Sundstrom’s paper, “Xenophobia and Racism,” contends that xenophobia, not prominent enough or properly understood in the contemporary debate, is distinct from racism and even nativism. The claim is concretized by the pointed observation that at the core of xenophobia is civic exclusion. Focusing on the finely scaled categorical watermarks left by differential interplays between xenophobia and...