Why are people afraid of "the other"?

Donald Trump and his cronies – both in politics and in media – have a long-standing habit of stoking fear of the other. Cities are scary! Immigrants are invading! Minorities are taking jobs and our spots at Ivy League schools! Men are competing in women’s’ sports! The crime is out of control! They’re eating the dogs and cats!

Perhaps you’ll notice trends of racism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ, misogyny. In this fear-filled world, people who aren’t straight, white, born in the U.S., are people we should fear; and women need protection, in a way that ends up keeping us out of the workforce or in limited roles. A mayoral candidate such as Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim of Indian descent and born in Uganda, isn’t scary because he supports socialist policies but because as a Muslim immigrant, he might be a terrorist. I wish I were kidding. Trump has called in the National Guard for both Los Angeles (also the Marines) and Washington, D.C., saying crime in D.C. is out of control and that troops were needed to quell civil unrest (read, protests) in L.A. Both were wildly overstated, and while D.C. does have higher crime than many other cities, it has dropped substantially in the past two years so is headed in the right direction, and also has far lower crime than a number of cities in red states such as New Orleans, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. What D.C. and L.A. do have in common is they both have Black mayors, which is also true of some other cities Trump likes to criticize, such as Chicago, NYC and Baltimore.

It may be easy enough to see why Trump and his crew stoke fear of the other – cynically, it may help them win in elections; some, based on years and decades of their words and actions, clearly are racist/sexist/xenophobic/etc in their core. But why do so many people believe the fear-mongering? Fears of crime were stoked by misinformation and propaganda (FOX News, famously, amps up the crime coverage leading up to elections). This is true; news media and politicians play a role by spouting false stories or only talking about a subset of stories. But why are so many people inclined to believe that people who aren’t like them in some way?

 Shifting now from data and statistics to a personal view, I don’t understand it. Maybe it’s just my personality, but I have always enjoyed meeting people who are different from me. It makes life more interesting! It could just be that I have an open, explorer-type nature, but I also wonder if part of it comes from how I grew up. Although I didn’t grow up in a particularly diverse place – my hometown of Davenport, Iowa, was more than 90% white in the 1980s when I started school – I got exposure to very diverse places. My dad grew up on a 100-acre farm in northwest Iowa. My mom grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Neither the countryside nor the big city was scary. Both were exciting. I loved going to both. I loved exploring new places and meeting new people – it was something to look forward to if we got to tag along when my dad had a work trip to St. Louis or Kansas City or Chicago or some other big city. And when we visited my mom’s family in D.C., I was always fascinated passing by the embassies and wanting to explore other cultures, too. Since I don’t have any way to separate out my life experiences from my nature, I don’t know if I would have been as open to meeting all kinds of different people if not for childhood experiences.

Regardless of the reasons, I’ve sought out new experiences and meeting people of all kinds throughout my life. I talk to people while sitting at the bar for a drink or dinner, in the neighborhood I live in, in cities I travel to and in countries around the world. Maybe we should encourage more of that - when I was a kid, it was normal to go around the neighborhood selling Girl Scout cookies or Christmas wreaths or World’s Best Chocolate bars. It seems parents today worry for their kids’ safety doing the same, or it might not even be legal in some areas. But there must be ways we can encourage people to get out of their comfort zones from a young age and meet people who don’t look like them or come from a different wealth class or are a different religion or all of the above.

There must be more we can do to counter misinformation and propaganda. People of a different religion or race or sexuality or nationality or gender aren’t scary, inherently. If so many people weren’t primed to believe this, the propaganda wouldn’t work.