Showing posts with label Xenophobia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Xenophobia. Show all posts

Friday, April 27, 2012

A to Z Challenge: X - Xenophobia

Xenophobia

There are some really disturbing photos for this word if you do a Google image search. I'm not sharing them here, not because I don't care about what's wrong with the world, I do, but activism is not really the point of this blog.

Anyway, although it might seem similar, xenophobia is not quite like racism or bigotry. It's not about prejudice or hate, it's about fear. Japan was a very xenophobic society in the Meiji era. You might say the United States has a lot of xenophobes in it today.

xen·o·pho·bi·a [zen-uh-foh-bee-uh] n. intense and often irrational fear of foreigners or strangers, or of that which is foreign or strange

Synonyms: there are no direct synonyms, but some related words are: nationalism, isolationism, ethnocentrism, jingoism, racialism

Etymology: 1903, from xeno- "foreign, strange" + -phobia "fear" (see phobia). Earlier (c.1884) it meant "agoraphobia."