Politics & Power Quote by Iris Chang

Acceptance, in Iris Chang's framing, is not a moral achievement so much as a conditional ceasefire. The line has the cool clarity of a historian who has seen how quickly societies congratulate themselves for tolerance, then revoke it the moment the balance sheet or ballot box feels endangered. "If the conditions were right" is doing the real work: it reduces public virtue to circumstance, not character. The implication is blunt and unsettling: acceptance is often less about empathy than about perceived utility.

Chang's second sentence is a map of the turn. She doesn't say prejudice appears; she says it "turns really ugly" when a group is framed as an economic or political threat. That's a diagnosis of scapegoating mechanics: prosperity allows people to perform openness, while insecurity creates a market for resentment. The "often" is important too. It keeps the claim empirically cautious - the historian's hedge - while still landing the indictment. It's not fate, but it's common enough to be predictive.

Context matters with Chang: as a historian best known for chronicling atrocity and the narratives that enable it, she is alert to how demonization is rationalized. This isn't just about overt hatred; it's about the respectable language that precedes it: jobs, security, national interest. Her intent reads like a warning about the fragility of pluralism in any society that ties belonging to perceived contribution and treats political competition as a zero-sum contest. Acceptance, she suggests, is easiest when it costs nothing - and most revealing when it does.