immigration, intolerance, and deception. He currently coordinates the Horizon Europe project EqualStrength and thoroughly enjoys teaching a class on lying and deception. He was the editor-in-chief of the Irish Journal of Sociology for a bit and currently lives in a village with his wife, the ceramic artist Yasha Butler, and his son. It’s a long commute, but worth it – for now. His next project is a book with Routledge on deception titled The Lies that Bind Us.
Creighton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book Hidden Hate: The Resilience of Xenophobia, and reported the following:
Unlike the 99th bottle of beer, the 99th page of hidden hate is neither the start nor the end of the book. Nestled in chapter 4, we get the tail-end of an overview of the Brexit campaign and a succinct underlining of the crux of the debate – sociocultural intolerance and political opportunism. The page covers some of the key themes of the work in that the disingenuity of material arguments against immigration are shown to facilitate an overt expression of xenophobia that is more concretely anchored in concerns about who the migrants are in terms of their country of origin, religious orientation, and implications for English national identity. The seeds of the broader argument emerge in the following assessment,Learn more about Hidden Hate at the Columbia University Press website.The key pillars of the Brexit debate, at least as articulated by proponents of the leave campaign, were twofold: political and sociocultural. The political issue was generally framed as an issue of border control. The points of contention targeted the discretion the United Kingdom had over EU and non-EU immigration. The latter was not a direct concern because EU member states retain discretion over immigration policy pertinent to newcomers from non-EU states; thus, the leave argument focused on the recent and potential experiences of EU enlargement.Although I would have loved to be a big winner with the Page 99 Test, I am not. I fall solidly into the category of “wait-till-you-get-to-110”. Seriously, 99 is okay, but 110 is a nice one. Here is a taste,The rise of populist parties…, linked by antipathy toward migration and … and support for national control of borders, reveals the paradox of the contemporary xenophobe. Changes in context (e.g., economic crises, strident political campaign rhetoric) shape how the stigma of intolerance is anticipated. This shift leads to changes in the strategy by which the xenophobe navigates the public and private arenas, which is a view quite different from one that sees the xenophobe as a fixed and observable social actor.This is really the core of the insight all those years of survey experiments revealed – particularly the ones before and after Brexit in the UK. The power and tragedy of the book’s central argument is that there is far more evidence that people mask their intolerances strategically than actually change their mind. We are solidly strategic in our choices of expression and controversial topics like xenophobia are when we are at our most cunning. To put it in my own words,This finding should not be interpreted as giving up. It remains true that the xenophobe is relevant and of concern even in contexts in which there is little acceptability of intolerance in the public domain. In a sense, a multilayered perspective is a validation of the experience of those who find direct measures of public opinion or soapbox-level political discourse disingenuous. Such experience doesn’t mean that the overt xenophobe is irrelevant, but the evidence provided here points to the importance of seeing overt intolerance as only one aspect of a much more complicated and situationally specific object of study. The key is to understand that there is no generalizable, stable, and objective view of the xenophobe. Instead, each layer, in some contexts, is the xenophobe. Taking this nuanced understanding of who the xenophobe is prevents counterproductive debates about determinants of intolerance—in some absolute sense—from becoming the focus of the conversation.That insight was from – wait for it – page 185. It leaves us with a collective task that requires more than just seeing the world as it is. Once the evidence from all the experiments done throughout the book settle with the reader, we can (and should) turn to trying to understand how masked sentiment contributes to covert acts. This is a next frontier for those who study intolerance public sentiment. The book helps convince us that the stigma of intolerance shapes what we say, but that is just the start.
--Marshal Zeringue
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