Duncan is a small town in a northwestern corner of South Carolina, with a total area of 3.5 square miles and a majority white, blue-color population, twenty percent of whom live below the poverty line.
Today, according to a 2011 census, Duncan has a population of 3,100. Duncan, by all accounts, is typical of what is known as Small Town USA, a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant outpost, frozen in time, to whom liberal ideas are anathema and the outside world is an enigma. Duncan, South Carolina, is in a way a replica of thousands of other small towns around the United States, no different, say, from Wyatt, Indiana, Lawrence, Kansas, and Palestine, West Virginia — place-less places, as it were, whose affairs hardly ever become the subject of news stories in the national media. Last week, though, Duncan’s affairs did.
About 200 highly agitated residents of the town met at the high-school cafeteria to discuss, yes, Syrian refugees. After a medley of patriotic songs, they listened to speakers address the Obama administration’s plan to allow into the country 10,000 of these refugees over the next year, with perhaps some (the horror of it!) placed in Duncan. Heavens, there were 25 Syrians immigrants already living there, and Duncan citizens certainly did not want any more of these swarthy Muslims buzzing around their lily-white, God-fearing Christian town.
One speaker told the crowd that the resettlement of Syrians in Duncan, and indeed elsewhere in the US, was “part of the New World Order game plan.” Another stressed that the US is a “Judeo-Christian nation,” not a “Muslim nation,” and those two “cannot coexist.” Yet Another worried citizen said:“The UN calls it ‘refugee resettlement’ — the Muslims call it hijra, migration. They don’t plan to assimilate, they don’t plan to take on our culture. They plan to change the way of American life.”
During the question and answer period, a woman wanted to know if the refugees could be sent home on “troop ships,” and a man asked if they could be “sent on a plane to Saudi Arabia.” Another asked, not altogether mock-seriously, “Do we shoot them?” This was followed, as a New York Times reporter present at the gathering wrote in his paper on Sept. 26, by “laughter and applause.” And that was before a single Syrian refugee had set foot in the town!
Where does all this prejudice, let alone utter ignorance, evinced all over the Euro-American world in recent weeks, come from?
The therapeutic community, or those researchers within it devoted to the study of racial discrimination, is in agreement that there are in fact different kinds of prejudice directed against different people, and these prejudices in turn derive from different emotional flash points. The prejudice directed at some groups, for example, could be characterized by disgust, others by anger, and yet others by fear. We tend to believe that people who are “foreign to us” are more likely to pose multiple kinds of threats — they are out there, say, to take over our jobs, deform our established culture, subvert our values, spread diseases, and the rest of it.
From the 1840s — soon after the potato famine in Ireland, when literally hundreds of thousands of Irish migrants arrived at Ellis Island, hungry, destitute and miserable, with lice in their hair — to well into the second half of the 20th century, before the Civil Rights Act, Irish, Chinese, Polish, Jewish, Italian, German and Japanese Americans were on the receiving end of pernicious racism and brazen acts of discrimination. Recall, if you wish, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party (with well over a million members), “Irish need not apply” signs, and the internment of Japanese Americans during the World War II.
Sometimes a bigot will turn on his own people, members of his own group, when he begins to see them as becoming sympathetic to “the other,” say by promoting multiculturalism. In that regard, consider Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the July 2011 massacre in Utoya Island, in Norway, who shot dead 69 participants of a Workers Youth League workshop where youngsters were being coached in tolerance. In Breivik’s view, the victims had it coming because they were allowing Muslims to “adulterate Norwegian culture.”
It’s been well over half a century since laws were legislated in the US that made racism, including xenophobic exclusion of “the other” and discrimination based on ethnicity, color and religion, socially unacceptable and morally repugnant. However, it is easier to legislate laws than to sway minds, as evidenced by the fact that wildly popular, fascist-leaning talk show hosts like Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, along with loony-tunes, Israel-First agitators like Pamela Geller, are still riding high. As are those simple-minded folks in Duncan, South Carolina.
