Xenophobia

Political Rhetoric, 1880

Irrational, unreasonable and outdated biological survival instinct derived from the wariness of infectious diseases, carried by strangers, easily spread to other populations without immunity. A racist social construct.

Contrasted with “xenomania” and “xenophilia” in the London Daily News around 1880 — before it was a synonym for “racist” — the term was first used to describe a fear of “foreigners” or “the Other”, similar to agoraphobia, in 1903 repetitively in The Nation. It has no basis in science or medicine.

• https://oed.com/view/Entry/230996
• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=xenophobia
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=xenophobia