“I Want to Get Rid of My Fear”

An Introduction

Travis D. Boyce and Winsome M. Chunnu

This edited volume examines the use of fear and “Othering.” Certainly, we’ll show how fear is used within contemporary political events. But this book goes deeper, searching many historical cultures and societies. We believe historians are crucial to the understanding today of how fear is used as a tool. This volume vigorously tackles how the “Other” is defined, how fear of the Other is reinforced and spread, and its use for political gain.

Throughout this volume, the reader will get a clear view of how individuals and groups are oppressed and marginalized. When we look at the past, we can better understand how fear is used now and how it could be used in the future. Fearful framing is ever-present in our society, as can be easily seen in modern life. For example, on July 21, 2016, Donald J. Trump officially accepted the nomination to become the Republican Party’s candidate for president of the United States. Once considered a long shot because of his lack of political experience, circus-like persona, and bombastic and divisive rhetoric, Trump successfully secured the nomination by exploiting and exaggerating his “liabilities.” Trump emerged from a crowded field of candidates during the primaries that included Texas senator Ted Cruz and the initial favorite, former governor of Florida Jeb (John Ellis) Bush, among others. Trump ran a presidential primary campaign featuring rhetoric centered on nationalism, ethnocentrism, and fear—most notably connecting Mexican immigrants to drugs and violent crimes such as rape. He even promised to build a wall along the US–Mexican border.1 In his nomination acceptance speech, Trump played on the fears of white Americans, a demographic that has historically controlled the political economy in the United States but that is now in decline and projected to become a minority racial group by 2042.2

Covertly calling for white unity in his campaign slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again,” Trump painted a bleak picture of the state of domestic affairs in the United States. He implicitly indicted people of color (African Americans) and Mexican immigrants for the “rise” of violent crimes (under the administration of this nation’s first African American president). He noted:

Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60% in nearby Baltimore. In the President’s hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And more than 3,600 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office. The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50% compared to this point last year. Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.3

Framing himself as the “law and order” candidate, Trump relished delivering a convention speech that emphasized supporting the police force, ignoring the fact that these institutions have historically had a troubled and violent relationship with communities of color. While offering his sympathies to officers wounded or killed by black assailants in the recent shootings in Dallas, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, respectively, he remained silent on the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, among others, by police—thus essentially endorsing the narrative, as noted by ethnic studies professor Arturo J. Aldama, that state violence against the Other (people of color) is acceptable:4

America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were brutally executed. In the days after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan, and Tennessee.

On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and four were badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order in our country.5

Instead of extolling national unity, Trump promoted division. Instead of offering ideas for reconciliation, Trump conjured up reasons for agitation. Instead of providing reassurance, Trump preached “fear of the Other.” His convention speech and rhetoric during the 2016 presidential primary and general election campaign reflected these issues, especially fear of the Other.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as this nation’s first African American president was a signal to white America that they would no longer be the numerical majority in the coming years. Political science professors Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto argue that an Obama presidency signaled to a conservative white America “the erosion of their position in America.”6 Moreover, Algernon Austin, an economist, notes that the white, conservative populous who hates and fears an Obama presidency translates to a sector of the population that harbors xenophobic, racist, and Islamophobic feelings.7 Trump successfully tapped into these anxieties to assemble a political base. He won the support of prominent white nationalists such as David Duke and other members of the extreme right (colloquially, “Alternative Right” or “Alt Right”) by carefully portraying people of color, immigrants, and Muslims as the Other (pathologically dangerous, a burden on the economy, and so forth) and thus a group to be feared.

Trump’s creation of the intimidating and even monstrous Other is not a single or isolated event but instead mirrors what is happening around the world, particularly in western and central Europe where majority white populations are told by right-wing politicians that their way of life is threatened by immigrants and non-whites. Nigel Farage, former leader of the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), rose to political prominence on right-wing ideologies, most notably his anti-immigration stance. He has especially opposed Muslim immigration; in addition, in 2014, he smeared Romanian immigrants as criminals. Farage’s racist campaign was controversial but still succeeded in propagating negative stereotypes of Eastern European immigrants. He increased the tension between white people born in Britain and communities of refugees and others seeking a place in UK society.8 Moreover, in the spring of 2016, during Austrian presidential elections, Nobert Hofer of the far-right and anti-immigrant Freedom Party, captured 35 percent of the popular vote in the first round of voting. Although Hofer did not win in the runoff, his anti-immigrant platform won a considerable amount of the votes and even won heavy support in areas that were historically left-leaning. Hermine Löffler, a fifty-seven-year-old Austrian retiree and a supporter of Hofer and the Freedom Party, was asked why she supported this politician’s political party with its anti-immigrant platform. She replied simply, “I want to get rid of my fear.”9

While xenophobia is propagated in many western and central European nations in an attempt to get far-right candidates into office, such efforts have recently proven most successful in the United Kingdom. On June 23, 2016, approximately a month prior to Trump accepting the presidential nomination, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. This referendum, popularly known as Brexit, was marketed to British, Scottish, and Irish voters with a shrewd combination of messages springing from racial hatred and xenophobia.10 These feelings were fundamentally grounded in working-class anxieties about losing jobs to immigrants. Exaggerated stories about the benefits available to people coming to the United Kingdom from other countries were also circulated. These myths about the effects of immigration are commonly held all over western and central Europe.11 Three years prior to the Brexit vote, exit polls from the May 2013 elections indicated that 45 percent of those who voted for the UK Independence Party agreed that the whole of Europe should put a freeze on immigration.12 Boris Johnson, London’s former mayor and prominent Brexit supporter (and a member of the UKIP), campaigned heavily under the slogan “Let’s take back control.” Johnson’s simplistic slogan’s nationalist, xenophobic flavor can easily be identified as being of one piece with Trump’s catchphrase “Let’s make America great again.”

Brexit supporters came to believe they were no longer bound by the moderate immigrant policies designated by the European Union. They began to act out their extremist and even violent anti-immigrant sentiments in the newly independent United Kingdom. While policies regarding immigration actually require a long legislative process to alter, there has been immediate backlash at the street level against non-whites and immigrants in the United Kingdom. Xenophobic violence, discrimination, and harassment toward immigrants and non-whites as a result of the fear rhetoric increased sharply.13 In the weeks leading up to and following the historic Brexit vote, hate crimes increased by a whopping 42 percent.14 In late August 2016, Polish immigrant Arek Jozwik, age forty, was hit in the head by a gang of British teenagers because he was overheard speaking in Polish.15 Jozwik died.

Examining fear and “Othering” within the framework of contemporary political events is an important and significant issue in history. But this volume seeks to do more—to broaden the context of how fear of the “Other” can used as a propaganda tool. The authors of this book examine many cultures and societies to see how fear is historicized. How is fear used to construct laws? How can fear help to devise policies of oppression? We decided that a collection of original essays examining the use of fear as a tool was a much-needed narrative after we coauthored a chapter titled “Fear Factor: When Black Equality Is Framed as Militant,” which is included in Novotny Lawrence’s 2014 book, Documenting the Black Experience. This chapter shows how “fear of the Other” has been used historically as a propaganda tool against African Americans seeking equality.16

This volume, Historicizing Fear, is grounded on the theory of “Othering,” which was coined in 1948 by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.17 This theory has received an incredible amount of attention as a theoretical framework explaining oppression. While a significant body of literature examines the concept of the Other, this book provides a global perspective. This book is motivated by historian Peter Stearns’s assessment in 2006 that historians should be part of the discourse with regard to fear and contemporary history.18 Further, this volume looks at examples of the use of fear as a tool to prevent groups or individuals from gaining equality.

Perhaps one of the best ways to understand the concept of Othering is to examine the institution of slavery and justifications for its existence. Orlando Patterson’s 1982 Slavery and Social Death is a helpful, comparative examination of slavery.19 Drawing from various societies in human history that treated human beings as property, Patterson’s premise is simple: human and social relationships have a power dynamic. The framing of one who is enslaved correlates to the notion of powerlessness and therefore the Other.

There is a range of literature that also provides a background in the Other concept. For example, Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection reinforces the narrative of the Other within the context of slavery.20 Unlike Patterson, who examines slavery from various societies in world history, Hartman specifically examines slavery through the lens of the development of black identity, as a result of Otherness in nineteenth-century US history (antebellum to the end of the Reconstruction era). Examining Otherness within the context of postcolonial/post-emancipation periods is also important. For example, Columbia University philosopher Gayatri Spivak’s essay and best-known 1988 work, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” tackles the issue of Otherness from the perspective of postcolonial India.21 What is most universally understood about her essay are the problems, ethical issues, and misinterpretations that may occur when one examines a culture based on stereotypes and universal understandings of that culture.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) embody a universal narrative of how the dominant society’s narrative of the Other can have a negative psychological impact on the Othered.22 Du Bois framed it (coining the term double consciousness from the experiences of African American life during the early twentieth century). For Fanon, the cultural lens that resonated for him was the racism experienced by blacks in colonial French Caribbean society. Sociologist Simone Brown’s 2015 book appears to carry on the spirit of Franz Fanon. In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, she examines how the notion of surveillance and systemic Othering has perpetuated anti-black racism and reinforced white supremacy since the founding of this nation.23 Historian Kahlil Gibran Muhammad argues that black Americans have historically been defined as criminals and pathological. Consequently, the white power structure has used this narrative to justify racial segregation, discriminatory treatment, and racial violence.24

Michael Waltman, an associate professor of communication, critiques popular and seminal right-wing literature (such as Ayn Rand’s 1957 Atlas Shrugged and Kyle Bristow’s 2010 White Apocalypse). His 2014 book theorizes that right-wing discourse in the United States is shaped by the basic concept of fear of white extinction and the Othering of communities of color.25 Inspired and motivated by Fanon’s 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth, ethnic studies scholar Arturo J. Aldama provides an edited volume that examines the Otherization of physical bodies (as seen through the lens of colonialism, the US–Mexico borderland, and Latin American studies). Aldama elucidates how physical and material violence reinforces social norms in that respective society.26 Historian Clive Webb provides an interesting perspective on the American Civil Rights movement by examining the rhetoric and activism of five far-right grassroots activists who effectively peddled fear of racial integration in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by Othering African Americans, communists, and so on.27 What is unique about Webb’s 2010 work in the broader context is that (1) it specifically examines fear and Othering at the grassroots level, and (2) the rhetoric and activism of the five activists in the book can easily be applied to any society (in terms of their techniques).

In José Esteban Muñoz’s 1999 Disidentifications, the author examines the performances of queer communities of color through the old white and hetero-normative context.28 While these members of society are Othered, Muñoz suggests that the performance of queer communities of color works within societal norms but at the same time redefines or challenges social norms.

Our volume, Historicizing Fear, consists of ten chapters, carefully organized in three sections:

1. 1. Defining the “Other”/Pathologizing Differences
2. 2. Reinforcing or Spreading Fear of the “Other”
3. 3. How Fear, Once Created and Spread, Is Used for Political Ends

These sections provide an unflinching look at racism, fearful framing, oppression, and marginalization.

Defining the “Other”/Pathologizing Differences

In chapter 1, Quaylan Allen and Henry Santos Metcalf have provided a stellar look at masculinity. They identify the race-gendered discourse about black male identity, showing that it reflects the discursive practices of a racially hegemonic society. Black male performances (what black men do) are often viewed or defined through a lens of pathology. In this narrow view, black men are assumed to be intellectually and morally inferior to white men—but also inherently deviant, dangerous, and a threat to society. How is the fear of black masculinities constructed? How is this fear propagated? Allen and Metcalf walk us through various social institutions that facilitate this fear, including the media, schools, and social policy. The authors take on the controversy of race-gendered profiling, which is evident in a legal system in which black men are disproportionately arrested and disciplined more harshly than their white male counterparts for committing the same offenses. The chapter gives us a close-up look at a tragedy: the 2013 killing of a seventeen-year-old black male, Trayvon Martin, and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman. The event mimics the verdict of the infamous 1955 killing of teen Emmett Till and as such re-ignited a national debate over the racial profiling of black men. The authors detail how the assumption of black male deviancy may have implicated Martin in his own death.

In chapter 2, Adam Fong moves us to ancient China. In this chapter we learn about the attitudes of Chinese elites during the Tang dynasty toward their newly re-conquered regions of the West River basin. They had gained what today are the Guangdong and Hainan Provinces and the Guangxi Zhuang Ethnicity Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. The author tells us that the Tang dynasty was a period of reunification and then expansion for the Chinese empire. Tang elite classes were forced to grapple with how and to what extent these newly conquered (or re-conquered) peoples would be incorporated into their empire. The elites viewed the southernmost parts of the Tang, the West River basin, as a wild frontier area full of manifold and hidden dangers, many leading to sudden death. To them, to be sent to this region was to be exiled from civilization, a fate that was only partially offset by the possibility of becoming rich along the frontier. These fears worked to marginalize the inhabitants of the south, who were dismissed as subhuman savages. The fear also strengthened notions of what “Chinese” civilization was by comparing it to an exotic, southern “Other.”

Chapter 3 concludes this section. In this chapter, Melanie Armstrong dissects the materiality of unseen, living, mutating microbes. Armstrong explores how the discovery of an environment teeming with microscopic life re-made fears of nature and, in turn, how this knowledge transformed people’s lives. The author shows us how the fear of germs enabled racialized political practices. The people in power found that they could manage citizens through the management of microbes. Armstrong examines images and descriptions of microbes in science reporting during the late nineteenth century, when people were “taught” to fear germs. She also considers how locating germs outside the human body created the belief that specific diseases could be controlled, even eradicated. Racialized representations of the smallpox virus during the global smallpox eradication campaign of the mid-twentieth century illustrate how fear of disease revives colonial narratives and rationalizes militant acts on the part of the state. In this history of microbial fear, Armstrong shows how biology became entwined with security. The author illuminates the present moment, when microbes are taking on new meanings through biotechnology. She calls our attention to the mechanisms of governance rooted in moral panics over the belief that human life is at risk from unseen microbes.

Reinforcing or Spreading Fear of the “Other”

Kirsten Dyck reveals, in chapter 4, the contemporary scene of today’s white-power musicians. These artists use their music to promote overtly racist white-power and/or neo-Nazi goals. According to this rhetoric, “enemies” of the white race (such as Jews, Muslims, people of African descent, and multicultural Western governments) are working to introduce people of non-European descent into geographic areas previously controlled by whites, hoping to “race-mix” whites out of existence. For white-power musicians and their fans, this purported threat justifies not only violent propaganda but also, occasionally, actual violence as well. Dyck illustrates how these lyrics not only update old racist constructs from eras such as the US Civil War and the Third Reich but also offer new ones (such as the Zionist Occupation Government Jewish conspiracy theory). Dyck explains why some individuals of European descent believe in white-power racism and the fear of miscegenation, despite the fact that overt racism has become a taboo in most Western countries.

In chapter 5, Guy Lancaster takes the reader to Arkansas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a time of terror, in which both vigilantes and state authorities carried out racial cleansing by the expulsion of African Americans. To make their point even clearer, they created exclusively white communities dubbed “sundown towns” (no African Americans, not even those employed as servants, were allowed to remain within their boundaries after sundown). This chapter is grounded in the work of philosopher Claudia Card as well as that of anthropologists Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, who observe that terror is “based on an interlocking feedback between memory and anticipation.”29 Lancaster shows how state authorities helped to promote fear, usually directed at white audiences. Racial-cleansing violence was rarely deadly, but it proved effective at altering the demography of entire geographic regions because it was explicitly couched in terror directed at an entire community. Thus there was no realistic expectation that the violence might subside when a particular alleged wrongdoer was apprehended and eliminated, as in the horrific but time-limited mob violence that led to a lynching.

Julie M. Powell, in chapter 6, reassesses the meaning of the first Red Scare and early domestic anticommunism through the lens of racial theory. This theory questions old notions of a grassroots hysteria by positing that Red Scare domestic anticommunism (what became an expression of racist nativism) was deliberately used by white business interests to cripple unionized labor. Souring American citizens on working-class solidarity, even if it was against their own interests, required an appeal to fear—not of the dangers of an intangible ideology but of the threat of the not-quite-white racial outsider. In 1919, elites (and those people with business interests) inaugurated a project of racializing communism. They capitalized on the rampant nativism of early twentieth-century Americans and a new racial hierarchy to ensure that communistic ideology and its attendant union collectivism gained no ground stateside. Ultimately, what elites needed to maintain the capitalist class system was a closed chain of signification that equated unionized labor with the alien, not-quite-white Other and the vague specter of communism.

Powell shows us how this emerged during the Red Scare of 1919–1920. Political cartoons from the Red Scare era serve as extant links in this chain—evidence of the pedagogical racialization of communism. Proscriptive cartoons, which instructed citizens to fear and hate the Other, racialized the communist as a menacing, savage outsider, un-American in origin, appearance, and comportment. Prescriptive cartoons supplemented such notions, calling on Americans to remedy the invasion by rejecting communism through racially charged calls for deportation and violent reprisal. This racial project inaugurated a shift in the nature of American anticommunism, in which conservative opposition gained ground not on the basis of any broad-based ideological aversion to liberalism but on the fear and hatred of a racialized Other.

Chapter 7 concludes this section. In this chapter, we explore how the plot, select scenes, and political messages from D. W. Griffith’s controversial film The Birth of a Nation (1915) left a lasting legacy of institutional racism, fear of equality, and Othering of African Americans. Both implicitly and explicitly, millions of white viewers in 1915 were reminded by Birth that black equality was to be feared. The idea that equality would be a disaster was framed in the context of the vulnerability of white womanhood, the possibility of black-on-white violence, and the probable ineptitude of black elected officials. Subsequent generations received the message that blacks were rapists and fundamentally violent and that they needed to stay in their place (and certainly out of politics).

Clearly, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, African Americans have made significant achievements with regard to racial equality. By the twenty-first century, an African American was elected to the presidency of the United States. Thus the nation should be moving toward a post-racial society. We argue that to the contrary, the United States has experienced a “rebirth” as a polarized, racialized nation, grounded on white anxiety and fear of black equality. To what extent is US society still mired in the message of D. W. Griffith’s film? Readers will explore three historical/contemporary issues related to themes presented in Griffith’s film in which blacks who sought equality were Othered and vilified as rapists—violent, untrustworthy, lustful, and incapable of self-rule.

How Fear, Once Created and Spread, Is Used for Political Ends

The Vietnam War is sometimes referred to as the first “pharmacological war” because the consumption of drugs by those in the service assumed alarming proportions, consequently resulting in a perfect example of how fear can be used to achieve political ends. In chapter 8, Łukasz Kamieński reveals that massive and habitual consumption of drugs during the war was contextual and usually did not continue after these soldiers returned home. But some media, politicians, and intellectuals (notably John Steinbeck IV) created the myth of the “addicted army.” For what purpose? The author shows that those people exploited the myth to blame soldiers for the nation’s inability to win the war. The Vietnam veterans were victimized; the public began recognizing them as dangerous “Others,” as junkies who would spread an epidemic of narcotic use across the United States. What is more, the image of the druggie veteran created a moral panic that was used to introduce and justify national anti-narcotic measures. One example is the launch of the War on Drugs in 1971 by then-president Richard Nixon. Thus the fear of the drug-crazed veteran was, in fact, politically constructed.

In chapter 9, Jelle Versieren and Brecht De Smet offer the fascinating story of the Belgian and Dutch organized workers’ movement. The authors transport us to the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Belgian and Dutch organized workers’ movement came into being. Why did the workers organize? The movement was a result of a series of local labor conflicts combined with the mass-movement politics of hitherto isolated socialist initiatives. Between 1780 and 1880, early industrialists used several social-economic tactics (as well as techniques of micro-physical power) to discipline the impoverished urban craftsmen and the influx of proletarianized rural laborers. The factory owners legitimized their practices of fear and discipline through a heterodox discursive strategy. First, there was a patriarchal call for obedience and also for the conceptualization of the factory floor as a natural chain of command. Second, there was the concept of individual prudence, which followed from a sense of duty of both capitalist and worker.

Only after the introduction of the economics of scale and an intensive socialization of production could the socialist movement link the economic-corporate interests of each group of workers with a political program. The factory owners tried to turn the tide by waging a propaganda war in widely read conservative newspapers.

The broadly anti-radical and specifically anti-Jewish hysteria of World War I is exposed by Jeffery A. Johnson. His chapter 10 concludes this section. He argues that anti-radical sentiments were largely subtexts of ethnic and religious discrimination. The most commonly persecuted and discriminated group was leftist Jewish Americans. Leftist (specifically Jewish) agitators during World War I spoke bravely against US intervention in the affairs of Europe. Jewish antiwar dissent (and fear of “alien radicals”) was greeted with a firm, negative response by the anxious average citizen. This seems ironic given the length of time it took America to enter the war and widespread separatist sentiments throughout the United States that held Europe responsible for settling its own political problems. But consistency has never been an obstacle to racist stereotypes or legislation. The darkest moment came with the passage of the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act, both of which drastically restricted free-speech rights and other civil liberties. As wartime paranoia reached its apex, two Jewish leftists, socialists Victor Berger and Louis Waldman, were actually refused their democratically elected seats in the US House of Representatives and the New York State Assembly, respectively. Few people today remember this incredibly high-handed refusal to seat a duly elected representative of the voters. The Red Scare of 1919–1920 culminated in hundreds of deportations. This culture of fear had profound implications for the political left. The mood of anti-radicalism and anti-Semitism offers powerful lessons about racism, discrimination, and unfounded alarm. This chapter suggests just how quickly and easily fear can drive political reactions that restrict prized freedoms.

College history instructors and students will find much of what is offered here to be thought-provoking. But all readers, especially in divisive political climates around the world where nationalism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and fear of the Other are on the rise, will discover something of interest in this book because of its interdisciplinary spirit and wide range of eras covered. For example, there is much in this book that will interest people who study popular culture, critical race issues, social justice, ethnicity, and contemporary history. It is our hope that this book represents the first in a series that discusses how fear and Othering from a historical context can provide a better understanding of how power and oppression are used in the present day.

Notes

Bibliography