Xenophobia... the worst disease...

I remember the song from the end of the 90's: Homophobia, the worst disease, you can't love anyone you like in times like these... I was at a writing course and all my friends there were singing it. Not that many of them actually were gay, just wanted to show their support. Or maybe the song just stayed easily in your head.

These days I'm more worried about xenophobia. I belong to the "white" part of humanity, and in practice that means that there are few places in the world where I'd meet with blatant racism. My features are also fairly hard to place, so even if there was a country where Finns were hated or despised (I doubt it), I could just pretend to be something else. Not so for everyone...

Xenophobia means fear of the stranger and it has existed forever. Seems to be a very human trait. One of the ugly ones, I think. We humans can mostly deal with the stranger who comes and blends in, thereby becoming "one of us". What is really difficult to deal with is the stranger who comes to our area but keeps his own language and culture. At times this has been the problem with Jews (always keeping their own culture and religion even in the middle of severe persecution) and the Roma (gypsies, also staying separate with their own culture and sometimes language). These days there are new groups. Americans are worried about the Latino that might not speak English - the worry seems to be that then the grand children of the English speakers will speak Spanish. Europeans are worried about different ethnic groups, mostly from Africa, and Australians want to make sure their boundaries stay closed enough so that not everyone from Indonesia and other areas in Southeast Asia can come in.

Maybe xenophobia stems from real worries? The history of mankind shows how peoples and languages move and push away what used to be somewhere. The Finns came from somewhere and pushed the Same living in the area to the inhospitable north - and even there the Same could not keep their language and culture in peace.

So do Finns think that the Somali will eventually do the same to them? Is this the under conscious fear? Do the Americans worry that the English language culture and white skin colour will become a despised scarcity?

I'm not sure, but what I am sure about - as an idealist - is, that we need to face our phobia and deal with it. We need to face the Stranger in his own culture and on his terms and understand before we can deal with the fear. Maybe then we will see what part is the Stranger and what part we have in common, as humans... Once we see clearly, maybe we can talk about immigration with actual sense.