Scapegoats

Scapegoating and Diversity

Traditional Judaism's scapegoat is distant from modern notions of scapegoating minority populations for the larger culture's difficulties. Where the ritual exiling of the blameless scapegoat constituted Israelis' ultimate confession of their society's wickedness, modern scapegoating flatters mainstream society as sinless and condemns the scapegoated out-group as the true cause of difficulty. It is often characteristic of societies that are experiencing severe stress, such as Nazi Germany in the interwar period.

The United States is the only wealthy country with a history of racial and ethnic diversity. The ease with which U.S. politicians and institutions rally popular fear and anger to blame powerless demographic scapegoats for vexing social problems is a consequence of the fragmented U.S. social structure. Institutional scapegoating hampers the development of effective, inclusive health and social policies, contributing to substantially higher levels of gun violence, serious crime, drug and alcohol abuse, HIV/AIDS contagion, incarceration, and other social maladies in the United States, compared with similarly affluent but less racially diverse Western nations.

Institutional scapegoating, an organized, politically coordinated strategy, consists of three key elements: (1) a social or health crisis demanding official attention; (2) a broad consensus of politicians, interest groups, and public opinion marshaled to blame the crisis on the purportedly inferior biology and culture of a feared minority group; and (3) widespread panic that the crisis is invading the middle and upper classes through their most corruptible links, women and youth. Social and medical scientists who supply and interpret “objective evidence” to support popular prejudices regarding the scapegoated group's innate inferiorities (such as intelligence tests administered to immigrants or imagined biological differences between races), even though later debunked, receive official and media acclaim.

In some cases, the scapegoated minority does manifest the worst aspects of the social or health crisis creating concern. More often, institutional scapegoating targets out-groups to avoid confronting behavior crises rooted in mainstream populations.

Institutional Scapegoating in the Past

The recurrent U.S. “War on Drugs,” inexorably linking “demon drugs” to “demon populations,” provides a salient example of institutional scapegoating. The late-1800s panic over relatively harmless opium smoking by Chinese immigrants occurred against the backdrop of the widespread addiction by an estimated quarter-million middle-aged Whites to patent medicine opiates such as morphine. Officials and news reports [Page 1202]spread lurid tales of opium dens where “cunning Orientals” seduced and kidnapped young White women into “degenerate practices.” Opium smoking was outlawed beginning in 1875 and cited as a motivation for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

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