Most of us like to think that we would have been the ones sheltering Jews fleeing the Holocaust, that we would not have joined the crowds on the town square watching the lynchings of Black people, that we would not have cheered the internment of Japanese Americans and then purchased their farms for pennies on the dollar. But we should remember that economically stressed Germans scapegoated people they historically feared and didn’t understand, and White Americans thought Black men were savage beasts obsessed with ravishing White women, and even the Greatest Generation didn’t think they could distinguish loyal Japanese Americans from the diabolical Oriental enemy. I don’t mean to excuse the irrational hatred that motivated some of them, but most people don’t think of themselves as monsters; they think their fears are justified.
So I’m just wondering how anyone can be confident that their fears of Syrian refugees–with elements of all three of these examples–are any more rational than these other tragic historical mistakes.