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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 420 as alien outsiders nor treated as xenophobic objects. However, middle-class African Americans know that this reasoning is false. Second, the Marxist may argue that it stands to reason that those who are more economically deprived and consequently have less to lose are correspondingly angrier, more desperate, harder to control and therefore more of a threat to those classes whose wealth they view and covet from a distance. This may well be true. But members of the underclass are not an economic threat, nor regarded as economically competitive with the well off for scarce resources. Thus this argument contradicts the implication of the Marxist view, that those outsiders whom we anticipate will consume more of the community's economic resources are seen as more of a threat, and those whom we anticipate will consume less are seen as less of one. On the contrary: the Marxist's retort implies that those outsiders who consume less of the community's resources are therefore seen as more of a threat. If this is true, then the community's fear of strangers cannot be unpacked as a fear that they will merely consume more than their comparatively reduced share and consequently deplete the community's economic resources. The real fear is that those who consume less eventually will consume the entire community in a suicidal conflagration of rage, violence and despair. This fear is not merely, or even primarily, about the loss of economic resources alone. The Marxist analysis of xenophobia also has the implication that, in so far as the worry really is about economic resources and nothing else, then the more economically secure a community is, the less xenophobic it should be. That is, the more resources it has, the more resources it has for protecting those resources, and the more resources it has for generating those resources. All these resources should increase the community's sense of security, and thereby make it at least somewhat more receptive to outsiders. This, too, is exactly the opposite of what we find in reality. Again consider American racism. Here we find that it is the more economically secure who seek segregated neighborhoods, workplaces, housing, gated communities, guards, doormen, guns, fences, walls, security systems, offshore bank accounts, and social contact exclusively among those of similar class, racial, ethnic and religious background. Indeed, the importance of these self-insulating measures seems to increase rather than decrease with level of economic wellbeing. It would appear, then, that the more economically secure a community is, the more ingrown, isolated, self-protective and hostile to outsiders it becomes. Again the Marxist may retort that this case also supports rather than undermines the analysis; for it stands to reason that those who have more economic resources have more to protect and more to lose, feel therefore more vulnerable and insecure and so must be correspondingly more vigilant against intruders. This, too, may well be true. But it, too, directly contradicts the implication of the Marxist analysis, that increased economic security is © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
