In this globalized world, the dynamics of inequality have reached a much larger scale than before. Nowadays, it is much easier for larger proportions of a country’s population to come into contact with people from other places, or belonging to other ethnicities.
All of this means that discrimination based on where one comes from or the culture to which one belongs is expressed in a very visible way. Of course, to speak properly, we must understand the forms that this discrimination takes. Therefore, in this article we will see what they are the differences between xenophobia and racism two types of hostile bias towards people considered “outsiders”.
Racism and xenophobia are two phenomena linked to each other, given that in both there is an element of rejection of the different that works in a logic of identification with the group and exclusion of those who do not fall within this category
However, they differ in very important aspects that allow us to understand how they are expressed in society; Therefore, we must know how to distinguish between xenophobia and racism in order to address these problems by directing our attention to what they really are, without falling into errors resulting from confusion.
Of course, it must be taken into account that these two types of discrimination do not have completely defined limits, and they often overlap; For this reason, many times people with xenophobic or racist behavior treat ethnicities and nationalities as if they were races, and vice versa.
That being said, let’s look at the differences that allow us to distinguish between these two concepts
1. Racism is based on racialization, xenophobia at borders
It is currently known that human races do not exist as biological entities, but as anthropological and social psychological categories. That is to say, the typical classification of different races that distinguishes between whites, blacks and Mongoloids (sometimes also reserving a separate category for Native Americans) is a mirage from the point of view of biology and genetics, a product of the historical dynamics and discrimination processes.
Therefore, those who are the target of racist attacks, physical or of any other type, are so as racialized people; that is to say, people who are perceived as belonging to a race, although this race is an arbitrarily defined concept. Of course, the definition of race is usually based on physical traits: skin color, eye shape, hair type, etc.
In the case of xenophobia, the boundaries that separate the group to which one belongs and the groups to which others belong are also historical constructions (linguistic borders and limits, for example), but These do not have a biological component and do not rely heavily on aesthetics of people’s bodily features.
2. Xenophobia appeals to culture
Another difference between xenophobia and racism is that the former focuses its discourse on the preservation of its own culture: rituals and traditions, religion, language, lifestyle and similar aspects, while racism appeals to entities hypothetically belonging to to our biology.
Thus, an unequivocally xenophobic message would be, for example, one that encourages expel foreigners because they belong to another religion, while a racist discourse would call for preserving racial purity so as not to mix with individuals who are supposedly deeply incompatible with us due to having other psychological and biological traits: different level of intelligence, propensity for aggressiveness, etc.
Thus, xenophobia speaks of cultural elements that are transmitted from generation to generation through education, imitation and learning, while racism speaks of genetically transmitted elements through reproduction, and which according to xenophobes are innate traits.
3. Racism seeks to legitimize itself through psychometrics and basic psychology, xenophobia through sociology
As we have seen, xenophobia differs from racism in that it does not appeal so much to traits studied by basic psychology and biology, but rather to statistics that describe cultural dynamics
For this reason, racism tries to rely on experimental and psychometric studies that have relatively small samples, while xenophobia relies on sociological studies. Of course, we must keep in mind that the sample size of the studies is not used to know if a research is valid or not.
4. Racism is less supportive of integration
Neither racism nor xenophobia trusts the ability of discriminated groups to adapt to societies to which in theory “they do not belong.”
However, from xenophobic perspectives it is not strange to believe that in small quantities certain individuals of other ethnicities can reach adopt the customs and ways of thinking of the people considered typical of the place while racism also denies the possibility of these supposedly anecdotal cases of integration, given that a race cannot be changed as it is hypothetically a biological entity linked to the genetics of the individual.
