In this highly globalized world, the dynamics of inequality have reached a much larger scale than before. Today, it is much easier for larger proportions of a country’s population to come into contact with people from other places, or from other ethnic groups.

All this makes discrimination based on where one comes from or the culture one belongs to very visible. However, in order to speak properly, one must understand the forms that this discrimination takes. Therefore, in this article we will see what the differences are between xenophobia and racism , two types of hostile bias towards people considered “outsiders”.

Differences between racism and xenophobia

Racism and xenophobia are two interrelated phenomena, given that in both there is an element of rejection of the different that functions in a logic of identification with the group and exclusion of those who do not fall into 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 that are the result of confusion.

However, it must be borne in mind that these two types of discrimination do not have totally defined boundaries, and often overlap; that is why people with xenophobic or racist behaviour often treat ethnicities and nationalities as if they were races, and vice versa.

Having said that, 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 now known that human races do not exist as biological entities, but as categories of anthropology and social psychology. In other words, the typical classification of the 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 processes of discrimination.

Therefore, those who are targeted by racist attacks, physical or otherwise, are targeted as racialized people; that is, people who are perceived as belonging to a race , even though this race is an arbitrarily defined concept. However, the definition of race is usually based on physical features: skin colour, 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 (borders and linguistic boundaries, for example), but these do not have a biological component and do not rely strongly on the 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 culture itself: rituals and traditions, religion, language, lifestyle and the like, while racism appeals to entities hypothetically belonging to our biology.

Thus, an unequivocally xenophobic message would be, for example, one that encourages expelling 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 because they have other psychological and biological traits: different level of intelligence, propensity to aggression, etc.

Thus, xenophobia speaks of cultural elements that are transmitted from generation to generation through education, imitation and learning, while racism speaks of elements that are genetically transmitted through reproduction, and which according to xenophobes are innate traits.

3. Racism seeks legitimacy through psychometry and basic psychology, xenophobia through sociology

As we have seen, xenophobia differs from racism in that it does not appeal so much to features studied by basic psychology and biology, but rather to statistics that describe cultural dynamics .

That is why racism tries to rely on experimental and psychometric studies with relatively small samples, while xenophobia relies on sociological studies. However, it should be borne in mind that the size of the sample in these studies is not enough to know whether a study is valid or not.

4. Racism is less supportive of integration

Neither racism nor xenophobia has any confidence in the ability of discriminated groups to adapt to societies to which they do not in theory “belong”.

However, from xenophobic perspectives it is not rare to believe that in small quantities certain individuals from other ethnic groups can come to adopt the customs and ways of thinking of the people considered to be 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 individual’s genetics.

Bibliographic references:

  • Garner, S. (2009). Racisms: An Introduction. Sage.
  • Rubinstein, H. L., Cohn-Sherbok, D. C., Edelheit, A. J., Rubinstein, W. D. (2002). The Jews in the Modern World, Oxford University Press.