Harry Hoetink has always taken the phenomenon of racial fear into account. In El pueblo dominicano, he analyzes the deep fear of Saint Domingue whites in terms of the sheer difference in numbers between them and the black slaves (1971:296-7). Driven by this fear, the whites unleash a ‘regimen of terror’ which, as might be sociologically predicted, generates not only a self-fulfilling prophecy but a grotesque inversion of logic: you justify the terror against the black on the grounds that what you perceive to be his intrinsic and natural barbarity terrorizes you. In other words, whites construct their own terrified consciousness of blacks. This explains the child who sits opposite a black man and tells his mother: ‘Maman, un negre,j'ai peur!’ Hoetink calls this an ‘archtypical fear and. . repugnance’ (1967: 78-9). While he once stated that such fears are directed mostly at the black male, it is clear from his broader sociological work that it also operates at a much larger group level.

According to Hoetink, relative racial numerical strength is only one of the factors which affects the majority group's image of what a minority is. Another important element is the degree to which the majority perceives the minority as being integrated into the societal whole (1963:65-6). Since it is the majority which sets and maintains the norms, it is their perceptions which create the minority. There are then two fundamental types of minorities: a ‘real’ minority which the majority perceives as a competitor because it is integrated into the existing normative structure, and the ‘exotic’ minority which the majority perceives as being outside that structure and, thereby, noncompetitive.

This paper has three purposes. First, to explore the process through which ‘real’ minorities come about and, specifically, the nature of the fear and menace which Hoetink believes they inspire in the majority group. What provokes and then sustains this panic, this ‘terrified consciousness'? Secondly, it attempts to unravel the nature of changes in majority group perceptions (prejudices), a process which Hoetink hypothesizes can convert real minorities into exotic groups. Finally, through a series of comparative, albeit shor!’ case-studies I hope to establish the generalizability - and therefore policy relevance - of Hoetink's concepts.