We live in the bodies of our ancient ancestors. They were not apex predators; being afraid of becoming a large animal’s dinner was part of their lives. Their brains grew to focus on danger above all else—their survival depended on it. And so we, with largely the same brains, fixate on that which we fear.
Redirecting Fear
It is easy to create a fear response. (Boo!) Poorly produced horror movies do it all the time. That means that it is also easy to trick us, to redirect our fear to a scapegoat.
I am always interested in how much history is hidden in the phrases we speak every day. Many ancient cultures employed sacrifices to purge their sins or troubles. The ancient Hebrews would choose two young goats. In the Bible’s Old Testament Book of Leviticus, God tells Moses and Aaron to take two young goats. One was sacrificed. The High Priest would then lay hands on the other goat and confess the sins of the population, then release it into the wilderness where its survival was certainly not assured.
The archaic verb “scape” meant to get or keep away, to escape or avoid something, especially through trickery or cleverness.
Now, we reunite the two goats, simultaneously loading blame and doing our best to destroy innocent scapegoated humans. We seem to think if we load onto them our fears, uncertainties and purge them, we will be alright. Deportation is an attempted purge of the deepest fears for this country.
The Scapegoating Brain
Psychologically, scapegoating is a defense mechanism, more about the source than the target. Shifts anger, frustration, guilt, shame away from oneself to the other. It skirts introspection. It is so much easier to hate them rather than ourselves. It is a way of explaining away failures and problems and adds to bias toward the scapegoated, who becomes the receptacle of projected failures.
Black people are a perennial scapegoat; we get dragged out on a regular basis and blamed for all kinds of things. Most people are harmed by people they know but in the public imagination, the face of violence is that of Black men. I’ve observed another insidious use, when the Black scapegoat is a front.
In one sense scapegoats are always decoys, leading us away from our real and difficult systemic problems. When you look closely, you might see that Black faces are used to open for wider applications. White people are the largest recipients of poverty-reduction programs but the public imagines welfare as Black. A dissertation at the University of Maryland tracked the documents and debate of a pending welfare bill. At the beginning, the documents accurately depicted a racially diverse group of potential recipients. As the bill moved through Congress, the faces changed and by the end, all the photographs were of Black people, which affected the debate.
Fears are loaded onto something or someone whom we see as expendable. Because Black men are more popularly feared in the US, legal Black Haitian, male immigrants were easily vilified in the public imagination. They were used to make an opening for actions toward all immigrants of color.
DEI is largely seen as benefiting Black people and that perception helped the recent rapid dismantling of DEI programs. But White women have actually benefitted the most and more than half DEI directors are (or were) White women. It is not yet clear if damaging out- of-home employment programs for White women is collateral damage or a real target.
There is a long history of scapegoating those considered to be outsiders. The deportation of Central and South American workers is like that of the goats. Load our problems and sins onto the innocent and send then away or try to destroy then—an over simplistic shifting that fixes nothing.
In a classic example of cutting your own nose to spite your face, we are even willing to hurt ourselves in an attempt to scapegoat and purge. Immigrants benefit us.
What are we afraid of? And what are we doing to the scapegoats of our national fears?
