Invasion anxiety about migration, terror, and disease is racially indexed

Evidence

Race, then, is itself an enduring occupation, one which in raceless contexts a critic takes up at risk, on pain of marginalization, being maligned, being considered almost mad. Its deepening invisibility is evidenced in its prevailing proxy articulations – its fixations, its pre-occupations – today in the powerful polities of the global north: migration and immigration, terrorism, contagious disease and viral spread. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1859 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Xenophobia, or its more general term heterophobia, thus turns out to imply a quite different structure of feeling to that of racial hatred. This is not to say that rivalries between close similars (qua narcissism of minor differences) cannot become racialized - as the horrible example of ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia clearly demonstrates - but this entails a qualitative transformation not a mere quantitative increase in the amount of libidinal energy invested in the construction (Ignatieff, 1995). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1389 (#complicates, via linked claim)

51% of whites in 1980 said that blacks were pushing for change at “about the right speed,” an increase of 26% from 1968. Fully 63% of blacks interviewed in 1964 felt civil rights leaders were pushing “at about the right speed.” That figure had dropped to 49% by 1980, as more and more blacks expressed the feeling that things were moving “too slowly.” In addition, the degree of racial polarization on this item was quite striking. For example, in 1964, 74% of whites said blacks were moving “too fast,” compared to only 9% of blacks, a difference of 65 percentage points. The trend analysis was supplemented with data on the correlates of a measure of perceived threat. Bobo found that general (nonracial) beliefs about social protest, along with indicators of the perceived incompatibility of group interests and fraternal deprivation, were strong predictors of the level of perceived threat. Indeed, these effects were substantially independent of intergroup affective orientations, political conservatism, and other background-control variables. The full set of results suggests that, to a considerable degree, attitudes toward the black political movement index concern with a real-world social-protest movement that attempted to affect the distribution of rights and resources between blacks and whites. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3373 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Zero-sum invasion anxieties are racially indexed even when unspoken — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1860; Migrant-seeking-opportunity narratives get reframed as racialized terrorist threats; Racial subtexts persist beneath cultural framing of anti-Muslim demographic anxiety — Matt Carr, You Are Now Entering Eurabia, 81 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Race persists through proxy topics like migration, terror, and disease #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1859
• Xenophobia and racial hatred rest on different structures of feeling #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1389
• Group-interest incompatibility, not affect, best predicts perceived racial threat #complicates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3373