Where do phobias come from? And how do they become political? In a recent New York Times article, Amanda Hess addresses these questions in an investigation of phobia’s rise as a sociopolitical register. Titled “How ‘-Phobic’ Became a Weapon in the Identity Wars,” the essay shows that the “modern ‘-phobia’ boom” can be traced back to New York psychologist and gay rights activist George Weinberg, who coined the term “homophobia” in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual. “‘Homophobia’ was a hit,” Hess explains. It became the go-to “descriptor for the intolerant” and a rallying point for gay liberation worldwide. Since then, phobia has fully infiltrated activist lingo. “Islamophobia,” “xenophobia,” “transphobia”—each fulfills a hallowed role for a corresponding social movement, organizing an array of discriminatory acts into an all-purpose buzzword.



But if we want to understand the origins of this phenomenon, we have to look beyond the history of homophobia in the twentieth century. For more than two hundred years, Americans have been using the “phobia” suffix as a political weapon. In fact, the first progressives to recognize its rhetorical power were not gay rights activists but nineteenth-century abolitionists. Two terms became especially prominent: “colorphobia” and “Negrophobia.” Armed with these neologisms, abolitionists developed a vocabulary that not only contested the slave system, but also unearthed an emotional basis for slavery’s persistence. In their eyes, racial phobia was a malevolent force—one that threatened to tear the nation apart. It was not uncommon for pieces published in Frederick Douglass’s The North Star, William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, Charles Bennett Ray’s The Colored American, and Lydia and David Child’s National Anti-Slavery Standard to focus entirely on rooting out “cases” of “colorphobia” and “Negrophobia.” At the end of the Civil War, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic had published hundreds of editorials tackling race prejudice in these terms.

By the late 1830s, colorphobia and Negrophobia had become central to national conversations about slavery and social life. Does this mean we have at last uncovered the origins of our many political phobias? Well, not exactly. It is precisely now, during a resurgence of the phobic imagination in political circles, that we should resist assuming a perfect correspondence between antebellum phobias and our own. Colorphobia and Negrophobia originated in a lexical relationship that has since faded from historical memory. The terms were, in fact, first imagined as analogies of a disease called hydrophobia, the predominant name for rabies until the late nineteenth century.

Transliterated from the Greek word ὑδροφοβία (in the late fourteenth century, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary), hydrophobia was the only major term in English to adopt phobia (φόβος) as a suffix for hundreds of years. Hydrophobia persisted as a name for rabies because it was believed that an intensifying fear of water was the first and most recognizable form the disease took. Not until the influence of Benjamin Rush did new phobias begin to garner interest. Remembered today for being the “father of American psychiatry” and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Rush introduced an original taxonomy of phobias in 1786, in an essay titled “On the Different Species of Phobia.” An amusing piece halfway between entertainment and sincere speculation, the essay cites hydrophobia as inspiration for fifteen other “species” ranging from Rat Phobia and Doctor Phobia to Church Phobia and Rum Phobia. As colorphobia and Negrophobia became two of the most commonly referenced phobias of the following century, they retained this same analogy to rabies.



“Illustration of “J.D.” (Jefferson Davis) as a Mad Dog, on a New York envelope, circa 1861-1865. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Hydrophobia was vital to framing the rhetorical fashion that followed. A writer for the black New York newspaper The Colored American put it this way in 1839: “The word [colorphobia] is first cousin to hydrophobia and so is the thing. It is a terrible insanity produced by the bite of slavery.” In short, hydrophobia imbued the charge of racial phobia in antislavery circles with a vivid picture of proslavery’s mentality. Consider, for instance, an impassioned piece published in Vermont’s The Voice of Freedom in 1839. Deciding that colorphobia had become a distinctly American feeling, the author cites the United States as the great “mad dog” at the root of the disease. The species “is peculiar to the land of liberty,” he writes, “where they all get bit by him, and the phobiac is indelible,” no more able to bear the sight of black persons than “a poor dog in the last stages of the rabies canis could bear the sound of Niagara falls.” Colorphobia was more than just a newly coined idea: It held in its etymology a riveting metaphor.