“How ‘-Phobic’ Became a Weapon in the Identity Wars”
“As the gay rights movement exited the psychiatrist’s office and marched up the steps of the Supreme Court, Gregory Herek, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, argued in a 2004 paper published in Sexuality Research & Social Policy that the movement ought to identify a new foe — like ‘‘sexual prejudice’’ — that is more befitting its civil rights agenda. Coding anti-gay behavior as a personal problem obscures the religious and political beliefs that are spurring anti-gay attitudes, he wrote…
Antagonizing your ideological opponent is built into the ‘‘-phobia’’ frame, and activists have sparred over whether that catalyzes progress or impedes it. Robin Richardson, an activist who edited the influential 1997 report on Islamophobia published by the Runnymede Trust, a British race-equality think tank, later revisited the term he helped popularize: ‘‘To accuse someone of being insane or irrational is to be abusive and, not surprisingly, to make them defensive and defiant,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Reflective dialogue with them is then all but impossible.’’…
‘‘Phobia’’ is now so embedded in our language that it’s easy to forget that it is a metaphor comparing bigots to the mentally ill.”
I love this point about creating dialogue, and it’s had me thinking about how we understand people who have different views as “enemies” and driven by stupidity or evil. And there’s something in here about mental illness and what we think it does to people, how we fear it’s impact on subjective reality and how we think it us shaping people’s choices and actions. When we can’t explain why someone is doing something, instead of engaging with their lived human lives and valid reactions to the world, we assume that have a mental illness of Grand and horrifying scale.
I’m frustrated by the term “culture wars” because, really, most things we do are not wars. But this essay still makes good points.
