The Good Xenophobe
Be careful about making friends with a xenophobe.
Every two or three weeks I have a conversation with a woman who has become a dear friend of mine – she is also an out-of-the-closet racial xenophobe. She isn’t flamboyant about it in any way it is just a part of her value system – to be loyal to and show preference to who she refers to as “my people.”
She isn’t ever mean to people of other races who are not her people, they are human beings that matter to her too, they are simply not her people and engender a lesser level of loyalty and priority from her.
We have talked about how this plays out in her life in a number of ways. She and her husband once renovated a rental property and rented it out at below market rent specifically to someone of their racial group because they wanted to do something to help “their people.”
She does what she can to secure public funds, grants, and corporate donations for her people, her racial group.
She also took the job that she did – a demanding, high stress, lower paying job – specifically so that she could use her gifts and abilities to help out her people. It’s not the kind of job that people tend to stick with their whole career without having some sort of personal crisis. It’s tough, but she’s going to stick with it until she can’t. She wants to do what she can for her people.
It struck me the other day that none of her race-oriented xenophobia has ever bothered me, and I think it would bother plenty of other people. I actually find these traits of love, loyalty, and self-sacrifice for her people to be admirable and I think the world would be a better place if more people were like her.
You could be forgiven for thinking I feel this way because I am one of her people, but I’m not. She is a black woman and I am a white man. . .and we are friends. We share real things with each other, pray for each other, encourage each other, and admire each other.
She’s got me wondering. Am I wrong in being okay with and even admiring these things in her? What if I found these traits and values in someone else of a different race or a different group? Would they still be admirable?
Would I feel differently about her racial xenophobia – all her loyalty, sacrifice, preferential treatment, and advocacy for those of her racial group – if she was white. A good white xenophobe? What if she was Welsh, Italian, Polish, Norse, or Appalachian and expressed an overt loyalty and preference for “her people?” Would something be different if she held these values as a Cambodian or Nigerian?
What if someone’s “my people” – folks that they give special loyalty and trust to, share resources with, and give preferential treatment to – wasn’t a racial group? What if it was a sports team, a local church or religious group, people who are a part of a particular religion, those with whom they share a particular history, a quilting circle, or an addiction recovery group? Are their in-group loyalties and preferences immoral?
Would the world benefit from having more close-knit tribes of love and loyalty or does the future and our very existence depend on rooting out this human tendency?
Be careful about making friends with a xenophobe. They’ll stir up a lot of questions.
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